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'THE ABSENT VALUES, THE PALPABLE VOIDS"
DECONSTRUCTING HENRY JAMES

BY
CHERYL B. TORSNEY

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE COUNCIL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN
PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA
1982

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I owe sincere thanks to several friends for their help on this
project: to Dr. Dan Fogel , for nurturing my nascent interest in James;
to Dr. Jack Perlette, for introducing me to post-structuralism and for
helping me through countless academic ordeals; to Dr. Carl Bredahl , a
careful, honest critic; to Dr. Aubrey Williams, for providing time,
space, and official escort; to cheerful, indefatigable Mrs. Mary
Windham, for her magic fingers; particularly to Dr. Alistair Duckworth,
ever generous with his time, books, and immense knowledge. Most of all
my deepest admiration and appreciation go to my husband, Jack Torsney,
for seeing me through, from the very beginning of it all.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

ABSTRACT iv

CHAPTER ONE THE MASTER OR THE CHIEF? 1

Notes 35

CHAPTER TWO "SHAKING OFF ALL SHACKLES OF THEORY

UNATTENDED" 42

Notes 77

CHAPTER THREE DECONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN 83

Notes 114

CHAPTER FOUR HYMENEAL STRUCTURE IN THE SPOILS OF POYNTON . 117

Notes 150

CHAPTER FIVE THE WINGS OF METAPHOR IN THE WINGS OF THE

DOVE 154

Notes 194

CHAPTER SIX THE END IS NOT YET. . . ." 198

Notes 209

BIBLIOGRAPHY 210

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 222

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate Council
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

"THE ABSENT VALUES, THE PALPABLE VOIDS":
DECONSTRUCTING HENRY JAMES

Cheryl B. Torsney

August 1982

Chairman: Alistair M. Duckworth
Major Department: English

Until recently we have lacked the methodology with which to
describe our difficulties with the James i an oeuvre. Two of the most
popular approaches to James, thematic and psychological, ignore the
subversive underside of narrative. With the development of structur-
alism and post-structuralism, however, we now have the concepts to
explain why the Jamesian text eludes us.

The questions I canvas are, first, why these texts hide, and,
second, how they hide: the devices they use, the textual manifesta-
tions of their absence, the particular manner in which each text absents
itself. I begin by explaining how a recent shift in certain philosophi-
cal thinking has led to our reconceiving our notion of meaning. The
shift has been from a tradition of "presence," in which belief in the
cog i to led to a belief in the unity of the sign, to a philosophy which
repudiates the presence of consciousness to itself, and, as a result,

rejects the concept of origin and the transparency of writing. Under
the new system of absence, language, a function of differance,
constantly defers meaning.

Thus the text eludes efforts to fix its meaning because signifi-
cance is delayed in verbal play, and, I contend, James's poetics as
exemplified in The Art of the Novel , suggest as much. The bulk of the
study, however, is devoted to deconstructive analyses of three James
novels: The American, The Spoils of Poynton, and The Wings of the Dove.
In the first, meaning is, in effect, lost in translation. Because we
must question Newman's linguistic prowess, we understand why he cannot
threaten the Bellegardes. Meaning, in the form of the completeness of
art for Mrs. Gereth and of the fulfillment of love for Fleda Vetch, is
deferred in the linguistic play on "point" in the second narrative. In
the third, we glimpse the abyss, always the fate of meaning in James,
through the eyes of a textual representative, Milly Theale.

Although many scholars of American literature have only grudgingly
accepted French critical trends, I believe that by treating James and
Derrida intertextually, as participants in a conversation, both speak
louder and more clearly.

CHAPTER ONE
THE MASTER OR THE CHIEF?

I am a bad person, really, to expose "fictitious work"
to — I, as a battered producer and "technician" myself,
have long inevitably ceased to read with naivete; I
can only read critically, constructively, reconstruc-
tively, writing the thing over (if I can swallow it at
all), my way, and looking at it, so to speak, from
withinTT

Henry James, Letter to

Howard Sturgis, 8 November 1903

Henry James dominates the American fictional scene in the same
way that God looms over the pre-Edenic abyss in Genesis. Single-
handedly, the received view catechizes, James brought forth from the
void a fictional poetics codified in his prefaces, novels, letters,
sketches, reviews. The Prefaces, especially, became an orthodox
primer for generations of readers and writers. For example, Percy
Lubbock in his preface to the 1957 edition of The Craft of Fiction
(1921) describes James, "the most magisterial" of novelists, as "a
large unhurried mind, solitarily working and never ceasing to work,
entirely indifferent to the changes and chances of the popular cry."
James's manipulation of the indirect "dramatic" method of narration
Lubbock sees as particularly praiseworthy. His method is, in fact,
the hallmark of his art: "Henry James was the first writer of fiction,
I judge, to use all the possibilities of the method with intention
and thoroughness, and the full extent of the opportunity which is thus

revealed is very great. The range of method is permanently enlarged."

In his introduction to The Art of the Novel (1934), still the only

collection of James's New York Edition Prefaces, Richard P. Blackmur

lauds James's own analysis and apology for his method, painting James

as the wise, benevolent, and most important, moral, father and

teacher. Blackmur comments: "we shall probably find as James found

again and again, that the things most difficult to master will be the

best," and later,

Being a craftsman and delighting in his craft, he knew also
both the sheer moral delight of solving a technical diffi-
culty or securing a complicated effect and the simple,
amply attested fact that the difficulties of submitting
one's material to a rigidly conceived form were often the
only method of representing the material in the strength
of its own light. 5

James satisfies F. R. Leavis, too, primarily though not exclusively
because of his profound concern for moral problems. In The Great
Tradition (1963) Leavis traces James's moral concerns to Jane Austen
and George Eliot: "Having two novelists of that kind of moral pre-
occupation in his own language to study he quickly discovered how
much, and how little, the French masters had to teach him, and to what
tradition he belonged." Despite his dislike for James's later novels
("His technique came to exhibit an unhealthy vitality of undernourish-
ment and etiolation" ), Leavis consistently praises James for his

"clairvoyant moral intelligence." In an act of supreme adulation,
Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) sets the Jamesian
"central intelligence" at the top of his hierarchy of possible points

of view. Thus glorified and revered, James was established as the

3
Master of Psychological Realism, and critics of all persuasions
flocked to the shrine of the trinity: James the First, James the
Second, and James the Old Pretender.

So reads the myth of the Master according to critics from Charles
Anderson to Larzer Ziff. According to this received view, James belonged
to a Western tradition of realism, devoted to "the serious treatment of
everyday reality."^' The standard bearers of the great realistic
tradition, Jane Austen and George Eliot, in addition to continental
writers, like Gustave Flaubert, Emile Zola, and Ivan Turgenev, were
James's role models, and source study upon source study testifies to
their influence on James's productions.

James himself is rather tight-lipped regarding his models despite
his undisguised, even effusive admiration for Zola, Flaubert, Balzac,
and George Sand in his Notes on Novelists. So undeniable is Jane
Austen's influence, however, that it provides both a thesis, for
F. R. Leavis, and a joke, for Rudyard Kipling. In Kipling's short
story "The Janeites," two soldiers discuss a conversation one over-
heard between two officers concerning a secret society woman named
Jane.

'But, as I was sayin', 'Ammick says what a pity 'twas
Jane 'ad died barren. 'I deny that,' says Mosse. 'I
maintain she was fruitful in the 'ighest sense o' the
word.' An' Mosse knew about such things, too. 'I'm
inclined to agree with 'Ammick,1 says young Gander.
'Any 'ow, she's left no direct an' lawful prog'ny.'
I remember every word they said on account o' what
'appened subsequently. I 'adn't noticed Macklin much,
or I'd ha' seen he was bosko absolute Then 'e cut in,
leanin' over a packin'-case with a face on 'im like a
dead mackerel in the dark. ' Pahardon me, gents,'

Mack! in says, 'but this J_s a matter on which I do
'appen to be moderately well-informed. She did leave
lawful issue in the shape o' one son; an' 'is name
was 'Enery James. '13

James's early novels, Roderick Hudson and The American especially,
reflect an interest in the "slice of life" local colorism popular in
mid-century Western literature. Where James made his greatest contri-
bution, however, was in the field of psychological realism, a mode
which may be defined as "an attempt to show what goes on within
characters, to present not only thought but emotive, even hallucina-
tory, states." He developed theories of consciousness, described
the form those consciousnesses might effectively take, and then
produced those forms in the novels. The style of the later novels,
Ruth Yeazell has remarked, can be said to dramatize "the painful
struggle of the intelligence literally to come to terms with full
consciousness — and thus in some measure to hold it in check."

Two celebrated quarrels helped to establish firmly James's
canonical position. The first, a rather cordial one with Walter
Besant, was provoked by the lecture Besant delivered at the Royal
Institution in April 1884 entitled "The Art of Fiction." In his talk
Besant, a best-selling writer of the eighties and nineties, defends
the novelists against charges of frivolity by examining his role as
teacher. '"The world,' he says, 'has always been taught whatever
little morality it possesses by way of story, fable, apologue, para-
ble and allegory." His own fictional practice attests to his
belief in a pragmatic aesthetic. For example, his novel about the
London working classes, Children of Gibeon (1885), contains a speech,

5
directed at both the working-class crowd within the work and the

middle-class reading public, which proposes to establish the Palace of
Delight, a sort of community center which would subvert the revolu-
tionary tendencies of the working-class by rechannelling energies.
All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1899) preaches trade-unionism. The
organizer, Angela Kennedy, has invited a self-described Republican in
favor of "root-and-branch reform" to her drawing room, and after a
short quadrille, she states her purpose: "You men have long since
organized yourselves — it is our turn now; and we look to you for help.
We are not going to work any longer for a master: we are not going to
work long hours any longer: and we are going to get time every day
for fresh air, exercise, and amusement." A third novel, The
Alabaster Box (1899), offers as an exemplum a young man who overcomes
his cowardice and learns about self-esteem and real friendship when
he discovers his own true identity. Thinking himself a gentleman,
young Gerald is crushed to learn that his father was the "notorious

Rosenberg, the usurer of Golden Square, the man whose name has become

19
a hissing and a proverb," and that the family fortune was ill-got.

The novel itself, Besant believed, was a commodity, a direct

instrument of social progress, "a vast engine" of popular influence.

We should respect it for the many jobs it performs:

it converts abstract ideas into living models; it gives
ideas, it strengthens faith, it preaches a higher
morality than is seen in the actual world; it commands
the emotions of pity, admiration and terror; it creates
and keeps alive the sense of sympathy; it is the univer-
sal teacher; it is the only book which the great mass of
mankind ever do read; it is the only way in which people
can learn what other men and women are like; it redeems
their lives from dulness, puts thoughts, desires,

knowledge and even ambitions into their hearts; it teaches
them to talk and enriches their speech with epigrams,
anecdotes, and illustrations.20

The good novel then, according to Besant, preaches a sermon designed

to route the reader to heaven. And a responsible reader would not

deviate from that path. For example, "a young lady brought up in a

quiet country village" would surely "avoid descriptions of garrison

life."21

James responded with what he termed "simply a plea for liberty,

an essay, likewise titled "The Art of Fiction," published in the

September 1884 number of Longman's Magazine and reprinted in Partial

Portraits. Ever tactful, James begins by praising Besant 's effort

saying, "There is something yery encouraging in his having put into

form certain of his ideas on the mystery of story-telling."" What

follows, however, is a complete rebuttal of Besant's assumptions and

an implicit censure of public expectation in manifesto form. James's

most radical pronouncement is that the novel is high art: the

novelist is an artist, not an artisan. Since a novel is a work of

art, neither novel nor novelist must adhere to arbitrary rules:

"Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon

variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of

standpoints." The only responsibility of the novel is that it be
interesting. The only reason for its existence, states James, "is
that it does attempt to represent life.' In that attempt, the
novel becomes like life, organic in nature. Explains James: "A
novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other
organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think,

,22

that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other
parts." Thus, character, plot, and other novel istic elements are

mutually inseparable, for "What is character but the determination of

27
incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?"

James leaves his refutation of what he considers "the most

interesting part of Mr. Besant's lecture"— his superficial reference to

"the 'conscious moral purpose' of the novel "--until last, for rhetori-

28
cal emphasis. For it is in this final rebuttal that James sums up

his claims for the Art of Fiction:

Vagueness, in such a discussion, is fatal and what is the
meaning of your morality and your conscious moral purpose?
Will you not define your terms and explain how (a novel
being a picture) a picture can be either moral or immoral?
You wish to paint a moral picture or carve a moral statue:
will you not tell us how you would set about it? We are
discussing the Art of Fiction; questions of art are
questions (in the widest sense) of execution; questions of
morality are quite another affair, and will you not let us
see how it is that you find it so easy to mix them up?29

The essay accomplished what James had hoped it would: "to make

our interest in the novel a little more what it had for some time

threatened to fail to be--a serious, active, inquiring interest. . .

Its publication even caused a small stir, eliciting yet another rejoinder,

this from Robert Louis Stevenson, published in the December Longman's

arguing against James's definition of realism. The essay's tentacles

of influence are still visible around the throats of many traditional

critics who continue to read "The Art of Fiction" as James's flat,

incontrovertible endorsement of Aristotelian mimetic and organic art.

,30

8
H. 6. Wells took some nasty public swipes at James in a 1914
addendum to his novel Boon, thus initiating the second, and not so
genial, literary quarrel in which James engaged. The elder writer had
befriended, encouraged, and promoted the neophyte, gently criticizing
his espousal of a pragmatic purpose in literature. In 1914 the Times
Literary Supplement published James's article entitled "The Younger
Generation," in which the writer assessed several of his younger
colleagues. While he praised the efforts of friends and admirers, like
Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, he complained that Arnold Bennett and
H. G. Wells produced disordered, formless novels. Of them James said:
"They squeeze out to the utmost the plump and more or less juicy orange
of a particular acquainted state and let this affirmation of energy,
however directed or undirected, constitute for them 'treatment' of the
theme."01 Forgetting that James had always qualified his praise with
private criticism and that even the Times criticism was nonetheless
courteous, Wells read the article as a personal attack. He retaliated
by adding to Boon, what Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray call "the most

esoteric and chaotic of all his works,"0 a new chapter entitled "Of
Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James." The chapter, which presents
a scathing caricature of James and his work, parodies all the things
about James that had irked Wells for seventeen years: his involved
manner of speech, his characteristic plot, his obscurity, his personal
manner. Taking James's "The Younger Generation" as his point of
departure, Wells disparages the Jamesian novel: "It is like a church
lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light and
line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently

placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of
string. . . ,"33

To salt the wound, Wells left a copy of Boon for James at his
club. James's response first expresses regret over the now necessary
dissolution of their long friendship, and then defends his own practice.
"The fine thing about the fictional form to me is that it opens such
widely different windows of attention; but that is just why I like the
windows so to frame the play and the process!" James concludes. The
Master's eloquent defense caused Wells remorse, and he responded by
admitting his embarrassment and by trying to mend the friendship. On
July 10, 1915, less than a year before he died, James closed the door
on Boon and Wells forever: "I am bound to tell you," James wrote, "that
I don't think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners
of Boon."35

What had ended as invective in Boon had begun innocently enough as
a friendly disagreement concerning the proper form and function of
fictional art. In "The Contemporary Novel" Wells declares the novel
"to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instru-
ment of self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of
manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions
and of social dogmas and ideas."36 The destiny of the novelist,
suggests Wells, is "to be the most potent of artists, because he is
going to present conduct, devise beautiful conduct, discuss conduct,
analyse conduct, suggest conduct, illuminate it through and through.
He will not teach, but discuss, point out, plead, and display."37 Wells
concludes that the future of the novel lies in answering political,

10
religious, and social questions. Wells espouses a pragmatic aesthetic,
which admits an engage didacticism, an effort to improve his reading
public. James, of course, propounds a modified art for art's sake
philosophy, which he defines in his final letter to Wells: "But I have
no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of
the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety,
its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and

shifting experience of the individual practitioner. ° He concludes
his letter with a firm statement of conviction: "It is art that makes
life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and
application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for
the force and beauty of its process. "39 Wells was able to reduce the
disagreement to metaphor, putting it to James thusly: "To you litera-
ture like painting is an end, to me literature like architecture is a
means, it has a use."

In a sense, both confrontations were classic, pitting Horace's
utile (in the persons of Besant and Wells) against his dulce (in the
person of James). James emerged triumphant, the invincible aesthete,
the champion of the formal art and artistry of fiction.

Through the years scholarship has focused on James's aesthetic
concerns: theme, character, form, and technique. For example, one of
the most popular Jamesian themes, the conflict between American and
European values, was dealt with as early as 1916 in Rebecca West's
Henry James. Critics of the fifties and sixties discussed the theme
in depth, and as recently as 1979 yet another study of the topic, The
International Fiction of Henry James by Jagdish Narain Sharma, appeared.

Two of the more important works to emerge from the sixties, Dorothea
Krook's The Ordeal of Consciousness in Henry James (1962) and Sal lie
Sears' Form and Perspective in the Novels of Henry James (1968), dealt
extensively with a variety of Jamesian character types. Other critics
made their favorite James figures the subjects of literary investiga-
tion: Sister Corona Sharp offered a study of several ficelles in The
Confidente in Henry James: Evolution and Moral Value of a Fictive
Character (1963); Muriel Shine treated the younger generation in The
Fictional Children of Henry James (1969); the Jamesian narrator became
the subject of many studies including Ora Segal's The Lucid Reflector:
The Observer in Henry James's Fiction (1969); and most recently both
Mary Doyle Springer and Edward Wagenknecht have published studies of
James's women in The Rhetoric of Literary Character: Some Women of
Henry James (1978) and Eve and Henry James: Portraits of Women and
Girls in his Fiction (1978) respectively. The luminous Jamesian form
has also offered the sky for critical seeding beginning with Joseph
Warren Beach's pioneering effort The Method of Henry James (1918),
running through some of the best work of the sixties, Laurence B.
Holland's The Expense of Vision: Essays on the Craft of Henry James
(1964) and J. A. Ward's The Search for Form: Studies in the Structure
of James's Fiction (1967), up to Sergio Perosa's Henry James and the
Experimental Novel (1978). Although it is difficult to discuss theme,
character, or structure in James without treating technique, some
critics have chosen to devote entire studies to examining a single
mode. For instance, while their critical assumptions diverge widely,
Jean Frantz Blackall (Jamesian Ambiguity and the Sacred Fount, 1965),

Charles Thomas Samuels (The Ambiguity of Henry James, 1971) and
Shlomith Rimmon (The Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James, 1977)
all consider the element of ambiguity in the Jamesian text. Charles
Anderson's study of James's technique, Person, Place, and Thing in
Henry James's Novels (1977), won the Christian Gauss Award for its
treatment of James's practice "of using places and things to symbolize
people, so that the fictional characters come to understand each other
(or think they do) and are able to establish meaningful relations.'

Nearly all this criticism, however, while reflecting diverse
interests, has assumed at bottom a mimetic function for the novel. And,
as a result, our readings, broad though they may appear, have in fact,
a rather narrow range of possibilities. There exists a point at which
the case of Kate Croy's culpability in The Wings of the Dove becomes
moot. One reason, perhaps, for the circumscribed range is a critical
bias for reading the Prefaces as a prescriptive, "fairly exhaustive
reference book on the technical aspects of the art of fiction."
Critics have tended to swallow whole R. P. Blackmur's categories of
Jamesian concern as stated in the Prefaces, general divisions such as
"Art and Difficulty," "The Pleas for Attention and Appreciation," and
"The Necessity for Amusement." Following Blackmur's lead, they have
dangerously announced themselves privy to "the genius and intention of

/IT

James the novelist.10 Blackmur states James s novelistic intent as he

sees it near the conclusion of his introduction to the The Art of the

Novel :

He wanted the truth about the important aspects of
life as it was experienced, and he wanted to represent
that truth with the greatest possible lucidity, beauty,

and fineness, not abstractly or in mere statement, but
vividly, imposing on it the form of the imagination, the
acutest relevant sensibility, which felt it. Life
itself--the subject of art--was formless and likely to
be a waste, with its situations leading to endless
bewilderment; while art, the imaginative representation
of life, selected, formed, made lucid and intelligent,
gave value and meaning to, the contrasts and oppositions
and processions of the society that confronted the
artist. 44

Using Blackmur's reading of the Prefaces as a template, critics generated
innumerable variations on that mimetic model. For example, Jamesian
characters from Roland Mallet to Maisie to Maggie Verver became flesh
and blood vessels of consciousness.

Seemingly James had done it, prescribed the right road of fictional
practice, and interpretive criticism had demonstrated its validity. If,
however, James had truly enunciated the definitive poetics of fiction,
why is it that recent fictional practice seems to so thoroughly fly in
the face of Jamesian strictures (or scriptures)? One need only look at
let alone read Donald Barthelme's "The Glass Mountain," a standard piece
in anthologies of contemporary fiction. The "story" consists of one

hundred numbered sentences presented in the form of a list--hardly a

45
mimetic picture of reality a la James. Although not entirely amimetic

since it does to some extent relate Ambrose's adventures in Ocean City,

Maryland, the title story of John Barth's collection Lost in the Funhouse

can scarcely be considered to announce organic form in the Jamesian

sense. Constructed within shifting time frames, the narrative is

interrupted intermittently by theoretical discourse on fictional

technique. For example, the fiction opens with the following paragraph:

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers.
For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion. He
has come to the seashore with his family for the
holiday, the occasion of their visit is Independence
Day, the most important secular holiday of the United
States of America. A single straight underline is
the manuscript mark for italic type, which in turn is
the printed equivalent to oral emphasis of words and
phrases as well as the customary type for titles of
complete works, not to mention. Italics are also
employed, in fiction stories especially, for "outside,"
intrusive, or artificial voices, such as radio announce-
ments, the texts of telegrams and newspaper articles, et
cetera. They should be used sparingly. If passages
originally in roman type are italicized by someone
repeating them, it's customary to acknowledge the fact.
Italics mine. 46

Even less comprehensible to an English-speaking audience, inculcated
with Jamesian theory whether they know it or not, are novels by French
writers, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, which appear
to reject all notions of plot and character.

Recent examples of fictional narrative, then, apparently invalidate
what we have come to understand as the Jamesian poetic. Can James have
been wrong? On the other hand, perhaps our reading of James has been
distorted by his commentators. James E. Miller believes such is the
case. "It is difficult to say how much of this appalling distortion is
based on firsthand acquaintance with James and how much on mere perpetu-
ation of earlier rigidified but widely circulated opinions." Miller
continues:

Of course James never, in his theory of practice, devoted
himself solely to method; and he never insisted that the
novelist must create the absolute illusion of reality.
But these myths circulate, and even informed critics pass
them on as received truth. At their center seems to lie
the confused question of the relation, in James's
practice and theory, of art and experience, of the novel
and life, of fiction and reality. 48

15
By reading Jamesian theory within the frame of traditional Western
metaphysics, a tradition of presence, those critics have, in effect,
closed James's oeuvre to other possibilities. Miller asserts that, in
fact, James's "own theory relating fiction and reality was inclusive
rather than exclusive and could easily be extended to embrace the
contemporary 'new reality' and the 'new novel." This 1976 essay
exemplifies an undercurrent in James's criticism that gathered strength
through the seventies. Scholars became less concerned with the tradi-
tional scholarly endeavors to establish a copy text, for example, or to
identify sources, and more concerned with the broader functions of
language, an interest presaged by Laurence Holland's exemplary volume,
The Expense of Vision (1964). This changing interest was perhaps a
manifestation of changing critical assumptions regarding the nature of
language and meaning, assumptions directly affected by new philosophi-
cal emphases. A strong tradition in Western thought held sacred the
intimate connection between the linguistic sign and meaning, between
word and truth, and until recently, literary critics, like Biblical
scholars, searched the text for patterns purportedly put there by
writers. The philosophical belief that origins and meaning were
recoverable occasioned, in the literary realm, traditional exegetical
exercises: explication of meaning, location of influences, identifi-
cation of theme. In the last decade, however, new philosophical prop-
ositions concerning the undecidability of textual meaning and the lack
of an authoritative origin, have called for a revision of the scholarly
enterprise and its underlying assumptions. As we might expect, the

16
readings that evolve from these new critical hypotheses are radically
different from those offered by critics who ascribe to the Western
tradition of presence.

By "tradition of presence" I mean the Western metaphysical tradi-
tion rooted in Christian-Platonic philosophy and encapsulated in the
Cartesian cogito. "I think therefore I am" posits a self present to
itself, which takes that knowledge as fundamental proof of existence.

Consciousness becomes a self-perception of presence. Upon that
consciousness, that immediate presence, philosophers such as Plato,
Aristotle, Augustine, and Husserl construct their ideologies. According
to the Western tradition, presence (synonomous with consciousness) is
embodied in language. God, for example, becomes the Word, which is not
questioned, It being now and forever present. He becomes the original
presence from which all other categories are derived. Developing from
consciousness, language is considered to be the authentic register of

reality, and the written word is thought of simply as the record of the

spoken word. Jonathan Culler comments on the implications of the

metaphysical tradition for a Derridean definition of language: a meta-
physics of presence "longs for a truth behind every sign: a moment of
original plenitude when form and meaning were simultaneously present
to consciousness and not to be distinguished."^ Our concept of
history, too, is determined by a metaphysics of presence, which sees
all temporality, past or future, as the once or to be present. Derrida
explains further: "The word 'history' has doubtless always been
associated with the linear pattern of the unfolding presence. "3°

17
Challenging the tradition of presence is a tradition of absence or
difference, associated with philosophers, such as Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche, interested in the "deconstruction of metaphysics."
Though the opposition is itself problematic (and the occasion of certain
internecine differences) absence may be posited as the denial of the

primacy of presence. Absence becomes nonconsciousness, once
consciousness is recognized as being "generated as one element in a

systematic interplay of linguistic elements which is the ground of the

56
mind, rather than the other way around." J. Hillis Miller explains:

The "I" or "me" which seems to prove its own existence in
the Cogito may be no more than a grammatical term of a
peculiar sort, as Emile Benveniste has suggested recently
and as Nietzsche in a somewhat different way had already
proposed in 1885. "It is within and by language that
man constitutes himself as a subject [comme sujet]," says
Benveniste; "because language alone in reality founds,
in its reality which is that of being [de 1 'etre], the
concept of the 'ego.'" "We used to believe in the 'soul,'"
says Nietzsche, "as we believed in grammar and the
grammatical subject; we used to say that ' I" was the
condition, 'think' the predicate of that conditioned, and
thinking an activity for which a subject had to be thought
of as its cause. But then we tried, with admirable per-
sistence and guile, to see whether the reverse might not
perhaps be true. 'Think' was now the condition, 'I1 the
thing conditioned, hence 'I1 only a synthesis which was
created by thinking ['ich' also erst eine Synthese, welche
durch das Deken selbst gemacht wird]."57

In a metaphysics of absence, then, meaning does not exist autonomously,
is not ultimately present; rather, language creates it. As our concept
of language changes, so does our concept of history. No longer a con-
tinuous unfolding of presence, history, in a tradition of absence,
becomes problematic. Derrida chooses to enclose the word with precau-
tionary quotation marks since our yery concept of the word includes
notions of origin, which he wishes to deny.

The philosophical criticism of presence initiated by Marx,
Nietzsche, and Freud, and more recently argued by Derrida has had pre-
dictable implications for literary criticism. A tradition of presence
assumes consciousness on the part of the writer and his audience, and
the writer's language is understood as a system of natural signs that
represent meaningful reality. Consider, for example, M. H. Abrams'
classic opening chapter to The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) in which four
categories of criticism are identified: the mimetic, pragmatic,
expressive, and objective. All four categories, it seems clear, derive
from a metaphysics of presence, along with the four coordinates of

aesthetic criticism they define. In making the "work" the focus of
his model , Abrams fails to recognize the ways in which individual works
are necessarily implicated in a network of texts, the prior existence
of which is in fact a necessary condition of their existence. In
discussing "universe" he further disregards the ways in which external
reality is already textualized, thus requiring the author's correction
or rearrangement. His explanations of the reader's and the writer's
roles also fail to account for a requisite linguistic competence which
results from intertextual exposure and enables texts to be written and
read. In these ways, all of Abrams1 coordinates are blind to recogniz-
ing the intervention of already-written linguistic structures, implying
that language is the direct transcription or representation of reality,
be it idealistically or materialistically conceived. In his review
of Abrams' Natural Supernatural ism, J. Hill is Miller identifies the
flaw in the model: "his own theory of language is implicitly mimetic.

Language is taken for granted as the straightforward mirror of an

interchange between mind and nature, or between mind, nature, and

God." Abrams, however, challenges Miller's accusations in the

Critical Inquiry forum:

I don't know how I gave Miller the impression that my
"theory of language is implicitly mimetic," a "straight-
forward mirror" of the reality it reflects, except on
the assumption he seems to share with Derrida, and which
seems to me obviously mistaken, that all views of langu-
age which are not in the deconstructive mode are mimetic
views. My view of language, as it happens, is by and
large functional and pragmatic: language, whether spoken
or written, is the use of a great variety of speech-acts
to accomplish a great diversity of human purposes; only
one of these many purposes is to assert something about
a state of affairs; and such a linguistic assertion does
not mirror, but serves to direct attention to selected
aspects of that state of affairs. 60

In defending his theory of language, Abrams proves Miller's point.

Language, he feels, does represent some pre-existing meaning. In

other words, it presumes and assumes a mimetic function. It leads to

presence though is not itself present.

Perhaps the best example of a critical method assuming presence,

in its aspects of logos and consciousness, is that developed by what has

become known as the Geneva School. J. Hill is Miller traces its roots

back from the critics of the Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, to Proust, to

mid-nineteenth century critics like Pater and Ruskin and romantic and

historical criticism. The Geneva School broadly defines criticism

as consciousness of consciousness, literature about literature, and

defines literature as a form of consciousness. In at least one of the

critics, Albert Beguin, the word "presence" is central.

20
For our purposes, however, the best example of the Geneva School
criticism of consciousness is Georges Poulet who has not only written
on James in The Metamorphoses of the Circle but who has himself
recently become the object (or subject) of J. Hillis Miller's meta-
critical analysis. Poulet's critical strategy involves identifying the
particular cog i to of each writer he examines. Cog i to he defines as
"the primary moment of the revelation of the self to itself in 'an act
of self-consciousness' separating the mind from everything which may

enter it from the outside." Subjectivity, the critical stance,
results when the consciousness of the critic coincides with the
consciousness of the thinking or feeling person located in the heart
of the literary text "in such a way that this double consciousness
appears less in its multiplicity of sensuous relations with things,
than prior to and separate from any object, as self-consciousness or
pure consciousness." Presence, then, is fundamental to Poulet's
criticism. As a result, Poulet has a tendency, Hillis Miller notes, to
take literary language for granted since he takes as given the authen-
ticity of the words in which a writer registers his experience. "It
is scarcely an exaggeration to say that for Poulet the language of the

works he discusses is seen as a perfectly transparent medium through

64
which the mind of the author passes into the mind of the critic."

Because he sees consciousness as the source of literary language,
Poulet uses words like "express," "reflect," and "imitated" in stylistic
discussions, thus demonstrating that acceptance of the Western liter-
ary tradition of mimesis or representation is a necessary corollary
to the acceptance of presence or logos.

21
In his essay on James, Poulet casts the Master as a sort of Geneva
School sympathizer, discussing James's conceptions of consciousness,
time, form, and character as revealed in the Prefaces, the autobiogra-
phy, and the reviews. Poulet begins by describing the event of Jamesian
self-consciousness:

The moment that Henry James' thought begins to take cogni-
zance of itself and of the world, it recognizes the infinite
character of its task. This consists of representing. Now,
everything is to be represented. The being who applies
himself to reflect the objects of his experience, perceives
that nothing is excluded from his experience. 65

Experience, for James, comprises the totality of consciousness, Poulet

explains. Continuing, he offers a Geneva-style explanation of James's

sense of time and history:

Far from being, as with Proust, a fortuitous time rarely
rediscovered by the working of involuntary memory, the
past, with James, is always present and goes on
constantly, enlarging itself like a spot of oil in the
consciousness; so much so that in the last analysis the
great problem for James is not to remember, but quite
the contrary, to clear his thought by forgetful ness.
But in his consciousness, images of the past come in
swarms. 66

Because of consciousness, James, according to Poulet, defines time as a
series of successive presents, and the novel as "a succession of
localizations.' To ballast his argument, Poulet cites James's meta-
phor in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady: "the house of fiction
(which) has in short not one window, but a million."0

James's notion of a "central" consciousness governs his fictional
form as well since a "central" consciousness implies "a kind of circular
disposition of the environing world. ""^ Poulet compares the mind to a
search-light moving in space, projecting its rays outward. The universe,

he explains, radiates concentrically from the central source of light.

Within James's works the search- light becomes the central consciousness,

the universe the world of the novel. Geneva's understanding of the

author's position in that world is evidenced in Poulet's reading of

James's place in his novels:

behind the centrality of the principal character, there
is still, with Henry James, another centrality, if one
can so phrase it, even more withdrawn; that of the author
himself. Every central character is for James a means of
perceiving things according to the angle of incidence
which a creature of his choice gives him. At the back of
the consciousness of the character, there is therefore the
consciousness of the novelist. It is like the conscious-
ness of a consciousness. Occult, dissimulated into the
background, it reigns no less everywhere. It is the
center of the center. 70

Given his "Geneva" associations, Poulet's evaluation of the Jamesian
novel does not surprise us. He finds what he is predisposed to find:
a subjective novel istic center in which is established "the simplicity
of a unique object contemplated by a unique consciousness."

Maurice Blanchot is usually identified with the Geneva critics,
such as Georges Poulet, because he shares the view that literature is an
act of consciousness. Yet he seems to anticipate the methodological
as well as geographical shift in literary theory from Geneva to Paris
by introducing the notion of absence into the critical arena. As
Sarah N. Lawall notes, "the 'presence' or 'immanent being' that the
Geneva critics see in literature is for Blanchot an 'absence,' a form-
less, characterless 'anti presence' underlying language and litera-

72
ture." This absence results from the nature of language, because to

name a thing, to replace an entity with a sign, is to destroy it.

Since language for Blanchot is a system of absences, of nothings,

73
literature paradoxically "rises out of its own ruins." Blanchot's

literary theory which posits that reading, in listening to the work,
becomes an act of interpretive understanding, is based on the German
aesthetic philosophy of Heidegger, Husserl , and especially Hegel,
three philosophers who also interest Derrida. But while Derrida
deconstructs them, Blanchot imitates them, proceeding by way of a dia-
lectical method, from paradox to resolution. ,

While the transition from Blanchot to Jacques Derrida seems
effortless in a brief survey of this sort, once we arrive on the other
side of the Juras, we see the irreconcilability of Poulet and Paris.
The Geneva School sees language as reflecting or embodying an immediate
presence, as a matter of mimetic representation, but Derrida, Roland
Barthes, and J. Hill is Miller, critics who, with important reserva-
tions, derive their linguistic theory from Ferdinand de Saussure, see
language as a palpable mediation between author and expression, or
between work and representation. For these structuralist and post-
structuralist or deconstructive critics, language does not transmit
meaning as telephones do speech; rather, meaning becomes a process,
a sort of chain reaction, whose end never arrives and whose beginning
we have lost sight of, but whose path we can trace. As Miller explains,
"Meaning arises from the reference of one signifier or phoneme to
another, in the interplay of their differences. Meaning in language is
always deferred, always in movement away from the present toward the
no longer or the not yet." Both structuralists and post-structuralists

24
agree to the instability of meaning, but most of their similarities
stop there. It is difficult, nevertheless, to draw boundaries sepa-
rating the factions since varying individual stances blur distinctions.
As Josue V. Harari observes, "It is too simple and too easy to view
the post-structuralist thrust as only an extension of structuralist
thinking, or as only anti-structuralist, or as altogether non-struc-
turalist (in its aims), for it is all three.' In general, however,
structural analysis focuses on the text as a tissue of already-written
linguistic signs and attempts to define the grammar, the system, upon
which the text is constructed. Post-structuralism likewise borrows
terms from linguistics to question language; its aim, however, is not
to generate a narrative model. Instead, post-structuralism seeks to
undermine the integrity of the sign and thus to decenter the text.
Their critical strategies also differ: structuralists describe systems
of cultural and textual codes, intertextuality, and self-reflexivity;
post-structuralists find in the sedimentation of language entry into
the never-ending linguistic labyrinth. Nonetheless, both structuralism
and post-structuralism denounce logocentrism and empirical representation
as critical dreams.

This critical shift from presence to absence, logos to difference,
is exemplified by Roland Barthes in his essay "From Work to Text."
"Work" is defined variously as that which can be held in the hand,
which closes on a signified, which functions as a general sign. Barthes
elaborates:

The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are
postulated: a determination of the work by the world

(by race, then by History), a consecution of works amongst
themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author.
The author is reputed the father and the owner of his work:
literary science therefore teaches respect for the manu-
script and the author's declared intentions, while
society asserts the legality of the relation of author to
work. 77

In other words, Barthes implies, the work is a demonstration of presence,
and the nineteenth-century novel is a fine example. As I have tried to
show, the Jamesian novel is almost invariably read as a work: James is
the father genius. While he may borrow images, characters, scenes, or
phrases from others, they become in his work thoroughly "Jamesian," as
the source and analogue studies claim. The text, on the other hand, is
held in language, can be approached and experienced, practices the infi-
nite deferment of the signified, is dilatory. The text, rejecting
presence, practices difference.

It is easy to see how a criticism devoted to difference is appro-
priate to a "text" such as a nouveau roman, whose purpose is to subvert
and deconstruct the conventions of the realistic novel. But can such
a critical strategy be relevant to more traditional writer writers like
Henry James and to their products, which are traditionally read as
"works"? It is heresy to read the Jamesian novel as text, discovering
instead of sources intertexts? Indeed, the apparent difference between
"source" and "intertext" is minimal, but the assumptions and implications
diverge. If we view Austen and Eliot, Emerson and Hawthorne, as inter-
texts, our picture of James changes. No longer the father, he becomes

78
the bricoleur, the handyman assembling the "mosaic of citations."

And the text becomes an orphan. "Meaning" now exists somewhere in the

play of differences between the language of the intertexts and of

James's more immediate one as well as between signifier and signified,

and between reader and text.

Under the influence of the nouveau roman, but more important, under

the influence of its appropriate poetics, the case of Henry James can

be reopened, as I propose to demonstrate. As Ann Jefferson explains

apropos of reading Balzac using the nouvelle poetique:

The nouveau roman makes us realise that the revelation of
a society is inextricably bound up with the revelation of
language. Each depends on the other, so that each can also
be read as a metaphor for the other; our view of history
is then coloured by our view of the language through which
it is constructed, and our view of that language is equally
determined by the kind of history which it elaborates.
It is in large part thanks to the nouveau roman that this
richer, more interesting Balzac has become available to
us. 79 '

Jonathan Culler, Jefferson's mentor, believes that

It is precisely the traditional work, the work that could
not be written today, that may most benefit from criticism,
and the criticism which encounters the greatest success is
one which attends to its strangeness, awakening in it a
drama whose actors are all those assumptions and operations
which make the text the work of another period. 80

The transition from work to text, a movement paralleled by a shift in

critical interest from consciousness to textual ity, provides a model for

changing our reading of Henry James.

Several upstart theoreticians and renegade Jamesians, doubting

James the myth, the Aristotelian, the father/author, have already begun

to revise (in the sense of re-see as well as re-write) the Jamesian

text. Tzvetan Todorov, in a 1969 essay collected in La Poetique de la

prose (1971), was the first to apply structuralist methodology to

produce new readings of James. "The Jamesian narrative," Todorov

explains,

is always based on the quest for an absolute and absent
cause. . . . The absence of the cause or of the truth
is present in the text—indeed , it is the text's logical
origin and reason for being. The cause is what, by its
absence, brings the text into being. The essential is
absent, the absence is essential. 81

To demonstrate his thesis, Todorov reads several James short stories,
focusing on "The Figure in the Carpet," which he considers one of
James's metal iterary tales. These tales exemplify what Todorov reads
as "the fundamental Jamesian precept," which affirms absence and the
impossibility of signifying truth. In order to justify his struc-
turalist readings, Todorov concludes his discussion of the Jamesian
poetic with a biography:

Henry James was born in 1843 in New York. He lived
in Europe after 1875, first in Paris, then in London.
After several brief visits to the United States, he
became a British citizen and died in Chelsea in 1916.
No event characterizes his life; he spent it writing
books: some twenty novels, tales, plays, essays. His
life, in other words, is perfectly insignificant (like
any presence): his work, an essential absence, asserts
itself all the more powerfully. 82

With the publication of Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics

(1975) and with the translation in the early seventies of works by French

theorists (not to mention the translation of Todorov' s collection in

1977), American critics became more comfortable with structuralist and

post-structuralist approaches. The years following produced the first

book-length structuralist readings of the texts. For example, in The

Concept of Ambiguity: The Example of James (1977) Shlomith Rimmon

describes Jamesian ambiguity applying the cultural codes named by

Roland Barthes in S/Z. Sergio Perosa (Henry James and the Experimental

Novel , 1978) uses the shift in Western metaphysics as a paradigm to

describe James's middle period: "James's experimental dealings with

the novel . . . mark the passage from presence to absence, from the full

picture to the total void, from solidity to solution to dissolution,

from realism to abstraction.' In his conclusion Perosa predicts a

massive revision of James scholarship:

In an age of Structuralism, James provides most of the
premises and quite a few illustrations of a structural
theory of narrative. He is a presence behind or inside
much contemporary theorizing, from Todorov to Genette.
He provides a solid ground and convincing samples on
which to build, test, and exemplify structural theories
and practices. 83

Nicola Bradbury makes camp on that ground in Henry James: The
Later Novels (1979). In that study William Veeder notes the "distress-
ing quality of much recent work on James . . . [which substitutes]
methodological trendiness for genuine interpretive innovation."85
Her radicalness, Veeder believes, is only terminological. Indeed, at
times Bradbury seems to be juggling with jargon: a tacit understanding
between Strether and Maria Gostrey becomes an "unspoken subtext,"
Osmond's sitting with Madame Merle is a "sign" translated by cultural
codes. References to Saussure disguise conservative readings. Of the
conclusion to What Maisie Knew Bradbury notes: "In the last part of
the novel James shows Maisie achieving a maturity beyond that of any
of her companions." Hardly original. When Bradbury does sight
something new, however, especially in her discussions of the later
novels, she quickly fires and then retreats. For instance, she reads
Kate Croy of The Wings of the Dove as a structuralist of sorts who uses
the metaphor of language to convey form, citing the line "she hadn't
given up yet, and the broken sentence, if she was the last word, would

87
end with a sort of meaning." In her discussion of The Golden Bowl

Bradbury, disappointingly, seems to side against the structuralists,

raising a traditionalist objection:

The Golden Bowl abounds in words which draw attention
to themselves as language, in phrases which seem to offer
comments upon the novel process, in characters who inter-
mediate between [sic] author and reader in relation to
their own story; but to extract and interpret these
elements as a paranarrative working independently of the
rest of the book is to ignore the cohesive impulse
toward interpretation within the framework of the whole,
and to invent an emasculated structure which is not the
novel James offers. 88

We can see, then, that Henry James: The Later Novels is somewhat uneven
methodologically. The study is useful, however, for its close readings
(Bradbury's forte is stylistic analysis) and for its attempt at employ-
ing new strategies of reading.

Others have used structuralist principles to establish James as
an intertext for the American post-modern novel and the nouveau roman
despite obvious differences in appearance and technique. Although
Sergio Perosa sees the "anti-novel" as practiced by Nathalie Sarraute,
Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Michel Butor as representing the complete
subversion of the nineteenth-century (Jamesian) novel, Strother Purdy
sees James as its spiritual precursor. Purdy perceives James as having
influenced the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Vladimir Nabokov,
Samuel Beckett, John Fowles, Arthur Clark, Eugene Ionesco, Gunter Grass,
and Jorge Luis Borges in a way that Dickens, Balzac, Kafka, and Proust
did not. Purdy claims: "It is that he markedout several areas within

the novel that have now become central to it. Those areas provide
the divisions of Purdy1 s book: the tale of supernatural horror, the

30
novel of disoriented time, the psychological novel of erotic theme,
and, most important for our purposes, the matter of nothingness, the
assertion of nothing.

John Carlos Rowe has led the charge in revising James scholarship
both by using structuralist theory on James and claiming Jamesian
influence on the post-modern novel. As early as 1973 he redefined the
novel for Jamesians in structuralist terms as "a delimited linguistic

world" in which "the tissue of words and signs which constitute the text

90
are the only reality of the work." Meaning, he explains, is disclosed

in the free play of those words and signs. Without resorting to

jargon, Rowe introduces the reader to the concepts of difference and

undecidability:

"If novel dramatizes its essential fictionality, as The
Wings of the Dove repeatedly does, then the attempt to
determine any final meaning is a violation of the work's
aesthetic integrity. It is in the very nature of the
novel as a literary form that any governing principle
for its structure is absolutely evasive. 91

Objective presence, he explains, does not inhere in the language of a

literary text. Rather, it is the reader who, in an "active engagement

of the language of the work and a creative transposition of that

language into the forms for his own understanding," makes meaning for

92
himself. To further justify his reading, Rowe points to James's

Prefaces:

If the Prefaces express a faith in the central signifi-
cance of the imagination, it is only in the shapes and
forms which it projects that it ever assumes any kind of
apprehensible "significance." The potential energy of
the creative imagination is a vast fluidity, an infinite
chain of associations which must be cut and delimited in
the form of the work of art. 93

31
In "The Symbol izati on of Milly Theale" Rowe becomes the first James
scholar to cite Jacques Derrida and to apply his notions of absence and
the impossibility of any transcendental signified to James's work.

An extensive revision of that essay became Chapter 6 of Rowe's
Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of a Modern Consciousness
(1976), the first book-length structuralist reading of James. Rowe's
bibliography testifies to his critical commitment and reads like the
structuralists' social list: Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel
Foucault, Geoffrey Hartman, Roman Jakobson, Claude Levi-Strauss, Richard
Macksey and Eugenio Donato, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Ferdinand de
Saussure.94 in addition to discussing The Wings of the Dove, Rowe
includes chapters on The American Scene and The Golden Bowl , in which he
offers some of the most enlightening, creative readings to date.

In his most recent contribution to James scholarship, Rowe takes
James's part in the critical debate over the form and purpose of
fiction, setting up Gerald Graff as the antagonist critical of what he
thinks is James's over-refined aestheticism, like Wells and Besant
before him. Graff, in Literature Against Itself, cites James for
crippling postmodern writing with self-consciousness. Because of his
devotion to technique, Graff, claims, James does not allow us to make
moral and ethical judgments concerning character and value. The absence
of moral meaning in postmodern fiction Graff blames on James. Rowe
then names Donald Barthelme, the parodic defender of "aestheticism"
against the Graffs (and by implication the Wellses and Besants) of
literature, as heir to James's poetics, offering "Presents" to demon-
strate his point.

' 32

In "Presents," as if poking direct fun at Graff, Barthelme
disfigures the distinguished visage of Henry James, in
order to remind us all the more emphatically how we have
stereotyped James. If we are scandalized by Henry James's
appearance in this story in "Iron Boy Overalls," at a
pornographic movie, walking between two naked women in
British Columbia, then it is our own overly reverent and
stereotyped conception of Henry James that has been
questioned. 95

James did not ruin postmodern literature by raping it of value. Rather,
by attacking the literary conventions of his day propounded by Wells and
Besant, he set the stage for Barthelme' s convention busting. As Rowe
puts it in his concluding sentence: "We must choose whether we wish to

build a monument to memorialize the Master or to ride and whoop in the

96
warparty led by Henry James, Chief."

Veneration or participation are our only real choices. Even repudi-
ation a la Maxwell Geismar is only a version of the former, for both
locate meaning and worth (of lack of them) in James's texts. Since
worship may require only the repetition of an already too familiar
litany, it is for my purposes, not to mention my temperament, unsuitable.
If, however, one denies that meaning inheres in words and so in "works,"
participation is the only option. Else how do we justify the consider-
able time invested reading James? We paint our faces and whoop along-
side the Chief, both of us unprivileged renegades, riding to engage the
text and in so doing, tracking meanings of our own.

To read James using a process- rather that a teleologically-oriented
criticism is to my mind a more interesting and a more productive propo-
sition for several reasons. First, a participatory, process-geared
reading seems more valid in our post-existentialist, nuclear age where
external meaning appears illusory. Second, by understanding that meaning

33
is also deferred in James, his specificity of theme, time, and place,
is neutralized and the narrative is made more relevant to the
contemporary reader. Moreover, in participating in a reading of a
Jamesian text, we are also rewriting it, enlarging its possibility (and
its undecidability), in chasing meaning, further deferring it. James
himself, as my next chapter examines, was a celebrated revisionist,
rereading and and rewriting his works for Scribner's New York Edition
and in writing the Prefaces to that edition, rewriting again. Through-
out his life, as his notebook entries demonstrate, he was intensely
interested in narrative processes: how, why, and what happens when
James, Jamesian figures, and we readers engage in our textual activi-
ties. Somehow, although all of us apparently expect meaning to be
manifest, it inevitably evades us in various ways.

This study attempts to apply recent critical theory to the Jamesian
oeuvre in hopes of answering some questions concerning the fate of meaning
in James. Until now thematic critics, whose work constitutes the bulk
of commentary of James, have assumed that meaning is "there" in the
novels, even if camouflaged by the dense texture and the uncoil oquial
syntax of much of the prose. James's writing only seems to refuse
interpretation, they submit. Such assumptions make diligent readers
their own worst enemies, for when they are confounded by the seemingly
impenetrable surface of a James novel, they give up, accusing themselves
of impatience, unpreparedness, or even dim-wittedness. By changing our
assumptions concerning meaning, however, we reinstate our access to the
Jamesian text. No longer expecting meaning to reveal itself, we accept

34
responsibility for chasing it through the dense though hardly impene-
trable textual labyrinth. What we had once thought to be a flawless,
polished surface, we now see is marked by holes and breaches, those
textual moments that call the unity of the text, its organic form, into
question.

Throughout my ride with James the Chief, I have deployed Roland
Barthes, Jonathan Culler, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida as the
avant-garde. Some may argue that the frequent incompatibility of their
philosophies undermines my fault-finding mission. Using Derrida,
especially, presents a problem since his work is so intertextual , having
been appropriated by Miller using Poulet and American accommodations and
by Culler via Barthes and American new critical theory. For example,
although Miller tries to make Derrida a proponent of absence, Frank

Lentricchia notes that "Derrida is not ontologist of le neant because

97
he is no ontologist." Moreover, Derrida, who denounces the system-
atizing of philosophical to explicate literary text, would denounce
Miller's reading of Stevens' poetry as an application of a system.

In the following chapters I pick and choose among the criticisms
and the interpretive techniques they afford depending upon the text in
question. The theories are, after all, tools, not rules, and I remain
uncommitted to all of their final philosophical implications. The
critics and I share, however, basic assumptions concerning the ultimate
undecidability of meaning, textual sedimentation, free play, and differ-
ance. In fact, Derrida himself justified my use, almost freestyle, of

contemporary criticism during a recent discussion of the application

98
of deconstruction when he said, "I'm for all marriages."

35
My hybrid method combining aspects of both structuralist and post-
structuralist theory predisposes me to find abysses and gaps underlying
the textual fabric of the three James novels I treat. They are indis-
putably there, however: a meaningless letter in The American, a fire in
The Spoils of Poynton, and a literal abyss and the heroine's death in
The Wings of the Dove. Meaning is consistently deferred. James's
Prefaces, his poetics, insist that reading and writing can do no less.
First, then, I will take up the poetics as expressed in The Art of the
Novel and then a novel from each of James's periods, early international,
middle dramatic, and late mandarin, to demonstrate how the Jamesian text
unravels to reveal mises en abvme.

Notes

"To Howard Sturgis," 8 November 1903, The Letters of Henry James,
ed. Percy Lubbock (New York: Scribner's, 1920), I, 429.

Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction (1921; rpt. New York: Viking,
1957), p. vii.

3Lubbock, p. 172.

Richard P. Blackmur, Introd., The Art of the Novel: Critical
Prefaces by Henry James (New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. ix.

Blackmur, p. xvi .

F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York: New York Univ.
Press, 1963), p. 127.

'Leavis, p. 165.

Leavis, p. 157.

q
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1961), p. 153.

Philip Guedalla, "Some Critics," in Supers and Supermen (New York
and London: Putnam's, 1924), p. 41. Guedalla's exact words are "The
work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic
arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pre-
tender."

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western
Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1953), p. 431. James, however, was not a naturalist, an extreme
realist dedicated to mirroring empirical reality, to portraying life
using a scientific exactness that tended to focus on its seemy, immoral
sides. Although he praised Zola's descriptive ability, James thought
he lacked taste: "Taste, in its intellectual applications, is the most
human faculty we possess, and as the novel may be said to be the most
human form of art, it is a poor speculation to put the two things out of
conceit of each other. Calling it naturalism will never make it profit-
able." (See Henry James, "Nana," in Theory of Fiction: Henry James,
ed. James E. Miller, Jr. [Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972],
p. 134).

12
The variety of book-length studies examining the influence of

continental writing on James includes Cornelia Pulsifer Kelley, The
Early Development of Henry James (1930; rpt. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois
Press, 1965); Bruce Lowery, Marcel Proust et Henry James: Une Confron-
tation (Paris: Plon, 1964); Lyall H. Powers, Henry James and the
Naturalist Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1971);
Philip Grover, Henry James and the French Novel: A Study in Inspiration
(New York: Barnes and Noble, 1973); and Dale E. Peterson, The Clement
Vision: Poetic Realism in Turgenev and James (Port Washington, N.Y.:
Kennikat Press, 1975). Innumerable articles trace James's inspiration
to French, English, and Russian novelists, but the award for prodigious
and thorough scholarship goes to Adeline Tintner, who has named sources
and analogues in over a hundred pieces on James. Her unflagging enthu-
siasm warranted a separate two-page recognition of her work in a recent
bibliographical essay on James. (See Richard A. Hocks and John S.
Hardt, "James Studies 1978-79: An Analytic Bibliographical Essay,"
The Henry James Review, 2, No. 2 [1981], 132-152).

1 3

Rudyard Kipling, "The Janeites," in The Best Short Stories of

Rudyard Kipling, ed. Randall Jarrell (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover
House, 1961), p. 628.

George J. Becker, Realism in Modern Literature (New York:
Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980), p. 115.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels

of Henry James (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 18.

Besant cited in John Goode, "The Art of Fiction: Walter Besant
and Henry James," in Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century
Fiction, ed. David Howard, John Lucas, and John Goode (New York: Barnes
and Noble, 1967), p. 249.

17Goode, p. 248.

1 ft
Walter Besant, All Sorts and Conditions of Men: An Impossible

Story (1899; rpt. St. Clair Shores, Michigan: Scholarly Press, 1971),

p. 176.

1 9
Walter Besant, The Alabaster Box (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co.,

1899), pp. 298-299.

Besant cited in Goode, p. 251.

21
Besant cited in Goode, p. 256.

Henry James to Robert Louis Stevenson, Dec. 5, 1884, in Henry

James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1980), III,
58.

Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," in Partial Portraits (1888;

rpt. London and New York: Macmillan, 1905), p. 375.

24
James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 376.

25James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 378.

26James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 392.

27James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 392.

28James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 404.

yJames, "The Art of Fiction," pp. 404-405.

30James, "The Art of Fiction," p. 377.

3 Henry James, "The Younger Generation," in Henry James and H. G.
Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of
Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (1958 ; rpt .
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 182-183. (Hereafter
cited as Edel and Ray)

32Edel and Ray, Introd., p. 35.

33H. G. Wells, "Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James," in Edel
and Ray, p. 248.

OHJames to Wells, July 6, 1915, in Edel and Ray, p. 263.

35.

James to Wells, July 10, 1915, in Edel and Ray, p. 265.

155

36H. G. Wells, "The Contemporary Novel," in Edel and Ray, p. 154-

37
Wells, "The Contemporary Novel," in Edel and Ray, p. 154.

38James to Wells, July 10, 1915, in Edel and Ray, p. 266.

James to Wells, July 10, 1915, in Edel and Ray, p. 267.

40Wells to James, July 8, 1915, in Edel and Ray, p. 264.

Charles Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James's Novels
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1977), p. 81 .

Blackmur, p. viii .

Blackmur, p. xxxi .

Blackmur, p. xxxviii.

Donald Barthelme, "The Glass Mountain," in The Norton Anthology
of Short Fiction, ed. R. V. Cassill (New York and London: Norton, 1978),
pp. 42-46.

John Barth, "Lost in the Funhouse," in Lost in the Funhouse
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 72.

James E. Miller, Jr., "Henry James in Reality," Critical Inquiry, 2,
No. 3 (1976), 585.

48James E. Miller, Jr., 586.

49 James E. Miller, Jr., 604.

50
Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on

Husserl ' s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: North-

western Univ. Press, 1973), p. 147.

51
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.

Press, 1975), pp. 131-32.

52Culler, p. 19.

53
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty

Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), cited

in Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago

Press, 1981), p. 56.

54
J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris? The Recent Work of Georges

Poulet," University of Toronto Quarterly, 39, No. 3 (1970), 219-220.

55
Jacques Derrida, however, renounces the dialectic of presence and

absence that I construct as a logical impossibility within a system of
differance. "Differance can no longer be understood according to the
concept of 'sign,1 which has always been taken to mean the represen-
tation of a presence and has been constituted in a system (of thought
or language) determined on the basis of and in view of presence. In
this way we question the authority of presence or its simple symmetri-
cal contrary, absence or lack" (Speech and Phenomena, pp. 138-39).
Absence is a contradiction of presence, and Derrida believes the concept
of contradiction bound to logocentric metaphysics, to "its speculative,
teleological , and eschatological horizon" (Positions, p. 75). He
further denies Miller's assertion tnat consciousness is an effect of
language since a system of differance renounces cause-and-effect rela-
tionships: "The system is of such a kind that even to designate
consciousness as an effect or determination ... is to continue to
operate according to the vocabulary of that very thing to be de-limited"
(Speech and Phenomena, p. 147).

Derrida's decoders J. Hillis Miller and Jonathan Culler choose
largely to ignore Derrida's entreaties to recognize the manifold rami-
fications of differance. Their "misreadings" (as Harold Bloom might
call them) have led to the development of an American strain of post-
structuralism currently popular on American university campuses. Derrida
and compagnie become like French grapes transplanted in the Napa Valley
or along the Finger Lakes: grown in and crushed on American soil, the
fermented product displays surprisingly new character.

56J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris," 220.

57J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris," 220.

M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (1953; rpt. New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 3-29.

59
J. Hillis Miller, "Tradition and Difference," rev. of Natural

Supernatural ism by M. H. Abrams, Diacritics, 2, No. 4 (Winter 1972) ,

p. 10.

M. H. Abrams, "The Deconstruct!" ve Angel," Critical Inquiry, 3,
No. 3 (Spring 1977), 427.

J. Hillis Miller, "The Geneva School," in Modern French Criticism:
From Proust and Valery to Structuralism, ed. John K. Simon (Chicago and
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 277.

62J. Hillis Miller, "The Geneva School," p. 290.

63J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris," 216.

64J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris," 219.

Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans. Carley

Dawson and Elliott Coleman(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1966),

p. 307.

66Poulet, p. 308.

67Poulet, p. 319.

68Poulet, p. 319.

69Poulet, p. 309.

70Poulet, p. 311.

71Poulet, p. 319.

7°

Sarah N. Lawall, Critics of Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1968), p. 221.

7*3

Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu, excerpted in Laurent LeSage,
The New French Criticism (University Park and London: Pennsylvania
State Univ. Press, 1967), p. 173.

Paul <ie Man, "Maurice Blanchot," in Modern French Criticism: From
Proust and Val ery to Structuralism, ed. John K. Simon (Chicago and
London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 260.

75J. Hillis Miller, "Geneva or Paris," 220.

Josue V. Harari , "Critical Factions/Critical Fictions," in Textual
Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josue V.
Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 31.

Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text," in Image--Music--Text, trans.
Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 160.

Bricoleur, as distinguished from engineer, is used by Claude

Levi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966),

pp. 16-17, to describe one who engages in the differential play of sig-

nifiers. Intertextuality is defined as the mosaic of citations by Julia

Kristeva in Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris: Seuil,

1969), p. 146.

7^Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), p. 209.

80Culler, p. 262.

81
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 145.
82Todorov, p. 178.

Sergio Perosa, Henry James and the Experimental Novel (Charlottes-
ville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), p. 203.

84Perosa, p. 204.

William Veeder, rev. of Henry James: The Later Novels and Love
and the Quest for Identity in the Fiction of Henry James, Modern Philo-
logy, 79, No. 1 (1981), 108-109.

Nicola Bradbury, Henry James: The Later Novels (Oxford: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1979), p. 22.

87Bradbury, p. 78.

88Bradbury, p. 145.

Strother Purdy, The Hole in the Fabric: Science, Contemporary
Literature and Henry James (Pittsburgh: Univ. of Pittsburgh Press,
1977), p. 12.

90John Carlos Rowe, "The Symbolization of Milly Theale," ELH, 40.
No. 1 (1973), 134.

'Rowe, "The Symbolization of Milly Theale," 134.

92Rowe, "The Symbolization of Milly Theale," 135.

93Rowe, "The Symbolization of Milly Theale," 135.

^John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of
a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 243-
250.

95
John Carlos Rowe, "Who se Henry James? Further Lessons of the

Master," The Henry James Review, 2, No. 1 (1980), 8.

96Rowe, "Who'se Henry James," 11.

Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 171.

y°Jacques Derrida, in a seminar given at the University of Florida,
Gainesville, Florida, April 19, 1982.

CHAPTER TWO
"SHAKING OFF ALL SHACKLES OF THEORY UNATTENDED"

This operation can be dragged out in laboriousness
and impatience whenever he who, having writ, stops
writing, and forces himself to adequately rejoin the
fact of his past text so as to unveil its underlying
procedure or its fundamental truth. Witness the
boredom experienced by Henry James while writing the
prefaces to his complete works at the end of his life.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination

James wrote eighteen Prefaces to accompany the New York Edition,

the 24-volume The Novels and Tales of Henry James, issued by Scribner's

beginning in 1907 and ending in 1909. The presumed purpose of the

Prefaces was to elucidate and summarize the theory of fiction James had

offered piecemeal over the years in reviews, essays, notebook entries,

letters. Strangely quiet on the specific subject of preface-writing

except to announce his ennui as he neared the project's conclusion,

James apparently considered the Prefaces part and parcel of the revi-

sionary effort exacted by the new edition. With few exceptions, critics

have seized upon the Prefaces as factual accounts of and elegant

2
prescriptions for the Art of Fiction.

The Prefaces should be read neither as formulaic studies of the
origins of each text nor as summaries of Jamesian technique, however.
The Prefaces fix nothing: on the contrary, in rereading the novels,
they add yet another stratum of data and make definitive interpreta-
tion impossible. The Prefaces, in fact, more than any other commentary

43
on James's work, subvert what is commonly understood as the Jamesian
poetic of "central consciousness," "solidity of specification,"
"organic form," and so on. By naming the unoriginal ("original"
signaling both freshness of perspective and a quality of the metaphysi-
cal concept of origin) character of his own work, James himself sets a
precedent for my reading of his novels. By beginning with the Prefaces,
we can see how Jamesian method offers parallels with contemporary criti-
cal theory, thus opening the novels to a deconstructive reading.

Reinterpretation of the role and status of the preface by critics
like Jacques Derrida suggests that a rereading of James's project, one
of the most extensive prefatory undertakings in the canon of Western
literature, is in order. Derrida has approached the preface as a
primary, autonomous structure, neither inside nor outside the text. It

is unable either to open or to close the text since the text can have

3
"no stable identity, no stable origin, no stable end." While tradi-
tionalists view the post-written preface as a "recuperative gesture of

4
mastery," the Preface cannot, in fact, perform in such a manner since

5
"each act of reading the 'text' is a preface to the next." A preface,

then, even a self-professed one, acts like any other piece of writing

does: it is subject to dissemination. Dissemination is, according to

Barbara Johnson, "what foils the attempt to progress in an orderly way

toward meaning or knowledge, what breaks the circuit of intentions or

expectations through some ungovernable excess or loss." To propose,

as I do then, that James's Prefaces short-circuit rather than assert

intention or cancel rather than set up expectation, is a radical

departure from the reading offered by Blackmur and company. That

44
Derrida's thought on prefacing is applicable to James ought to be
suggested by the Maitre's reference to the Master, cited as the epi-
graph to this chapter. Even Derrida, however, seems to short-change
James by choosing to comment on his boredom rather than on the texture
of the Prefaces, a metal iterary text of great import.

Let us begin by examining more carefully Derrida's understanding of
the prefatory project. Near the beginning of his prefatory deconstruc-
tion of the preface in/to Dissemination, an essay translated as "Hors
Livre: Outwork, Hors d'oeuvre, Extratext, Foreplay, Bookend, Facing,
Prefacing," Derrida offers a definition to introduce the problem of the
post-written preface:

A preface would retrace and presage here a general
theory and practice of deconstruction, that strategy
without which the possibility of a critique could exist
only in fragmentary, empiricist surges that amount in
effect to a non-equivocal confirmation of metaphysics.
The preface would announce in the future tense ("this is
what you are going to read") the conceptual content or
significance (here, that strange strategy without finality,
the debility or failure that organizes the telos or the
eschaton, which reinscribes restricted economy within
general economy) of what will already have been written.
And thus sufficiently read to be gathered up in its semantic
tenor and proposed in advance. From the viewpoint of the
fore-word, which recreates an intention-to-say after the
fact, the text exists as something written--a past — which,
under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent
author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to
the reader as his future. Here is what I wrote, then read,
and what I am writing that you are going to read. After
which you will again be able to take possession of this
preface which in sum you have not yet begun to read, even
though, once having read it, you will already have anticipated
everything that follows and thus you might just as well
dispense with reading the rest. The pre of the preface makes
the future present, represents it, draws it closer, breathes
it in, and in going ahead of it puts it ahead. The pre
reduces the future to the form of manifest presence. 7

45
Given his definition, ("an essential and ludicrous operation"; caught
in a system of differance), the preface is self-subverting because, as
writing, it belongs to none of these time frames, present, past, or
future, since they are all modified presents. Moreover, because the
operation of the preface would "confine itself to the discursive effects
of an intention to mean" and point out "a single thematic nucleus or a
single guiding thesis," the preface would negate the textual displace-

ment at work within it. Yet, its disseminating character renders the
preface resistant to reducing a text to its effects of meaning, content,
thesis, or theme.

The structure of a preface is not that of "a table, a code, an

annotated summary of prominent signifieds, or an index of key words or

9
of proper names." Derrida presents instead the metaphor of the magic

slate, a child's writing toy composed of a dark, waxed surface covered

first by a thin, light-colored opaque sheet and then by a transparent

piece of cellophane. When the child writes on the cellophane, the

opaque layer registers the image; however, when the two layers are

separated from the wax, the image disappears on the opaque layer but is

retained in the underlying wax surface. Derrida deconstructs his

metaphor:

Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, pre-
ludes, preliminaries, preambles, prologues, and prolegomena,
have always been written, it seems, in view of their own
self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of the pre- (which
presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the presenta-
tive production, and, in order to put before the reader's
eyes what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict,
and predicate), the route which has been covered must
cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of
erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text

and which cannot be completely summed up within it.
Such an operation thus appears contradictory, and the
same is true of the interest one takes in it JO

The preface is the "residue of writing," which "remains anterior and

exterior to the development of the content it announces. Preceding

what ought to be able to present itself on its own, the preface falls

like an empty husk, a piece of formal refuse, a moment of dryness or

loquacity, sometimes both at once." Neither inside nor outside, the

preface is a supplementary third term whose status is called into

question. What is the status of

This term that is never sublated by the dialectical method
without leaving a remainder? That is neither a pure form,
completely empty, since it announces the path and the seman-
tic production of the concept, nor a content, a moment of
meaning since it remains external to the logos of which
it indefinitely feeds the critique, if only through the gap
between ratiocination and rationality, between empirical
history and conceptual history? If one sets out from the
oppositions form/content, signifier/signified, sensible/
intelligible, one cannot comprehend the writing of a
preface J 2

That is precisely Hegel's problem as Derrida sees it. Teleologically
motivated to make of the preface a postface, Hegel remains mired in

formalist, logocentric metaphysics, "as close and as foreign as possible

13
to a 'modern' conception of the text or of writing." Derrida

comments:

Absolute knowledge is present at the zero point of the
philosophical exposition. Its teleology has determined
the preface as a postface, the last chapter of the Phenom-
enology of Spirit as a foreword, the Logic as an Intro-
duction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. This point of
ontoteleological fusion reduces both precipitation and
after-effect to mere appearances or to sublatable
negativities J4

The preface, the semantic after-effect, Derrida explains,

cannot be turned back into a teleological anticipation
and into the soothing order of the future perfect [that
tense in which prefaces are normally written]; the gap
between the empty ''form," and the fullness of "meaning"
is structurally irremediable, and any formalism, as well
as any thematicism, will be impotent to dominate that
structure. 15

The process of dissemination interrupts the cycle that reads the preface,
an after-effect of meaning, as origin.

Dissemination is a differential decentering, delimitation, and re-
inscription of binary logic: it subverts intentions of unity. In her
introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak defines dis-
semination as a version of textual ity:

A sewing that does not produce plants, but is simply
infinitely repeated. A semination that is not insemina-
tion but dissemination, seed spilled in vain, an
emission that cannot return to its origin in the father.
Not an exact and controlled polysemy, but a proliferation
of always different, always postponed meanings. 16

According to Derrida, a preface is a disseminating operation. Due to

dissemination, the preface

becomes necessary and structurally interminable, it can
no longer be described in terms of a speculative dialectic:
it is no longer merely an empty form, a vacant significance,
the pure empiricity of the non-concept, but a completely
other structure, a more powerful one, capable of accounting
for effects of meaning, experience, concept, and reality,
reinscribing them without this operation's being the
inclusion of any ideal "begreifen. "17

The preface is finally an other text and an assisting discourse,

the double of what it exceeds. Derrida remarks:

According to the logic of sublation, the postface provides
the truth both of the preface (always stated after the
fact) and of the entire discourse (produced out of abso-
lute knowledge). The simulacrum of a postface would
therefore consist of feigning the final revelation of the
meaning or functioning of a given stretch of languageJS

48
Producing the simulacrum of the postface, the preface, can be a thank-
less task, Derrida suggests:

This operation can be dragged out in laboriousness and
impatience whenever he who having writ, stops writing,
and forces himself to adequately rejoin the fact of his
past text so as to unveil its underlying procedure or
its fundamental truth. Witness the boredom experienced
by Henry James while writing the prefaces to his complete
works at the end of his life. 19

After citing Theophile Gautier and Gustave Flaubert on the irritation

of preface writing, Derrida continues:

But the simulacrum can also be play-acted: while
pretending to turn around and look backward, one is also
in fact starting over again, adding an extra text, com-
plicating the scene, opening up within the labyrinth, a
supplementary digression, which is also a false mirror that
pushes the labyrinth's infinity back forever in mimed —
that is, endless—speculation. It is the textual restance
of an operation, which can be neither opposed nor reduced
to the so-called "principal" body of a book, to the
supposed referent of the postface, nor even to its own
semantic tenor. Dissemination would propose a certain
theory--to be followed, also, as a marching order quite
ancient in its form — of digression. . . .20

The distinction between the "real" and the "play-acted" simulacrum is

not completely clear since the writing of the first necessitates the

action of the second. In his dissemination of prefaces, Derrida rushes

past James much too quickly. Although preface-writing may well have

led James to ennui, Derrida does not give him enough play. Stiff though

the Prefaces may seem, there is play yet in the joints that Derrida

does not consider. If we play with the problem of the preface (and thus

play into Derrida's hands), we too can start over, alert, as we have

become, to the many manifestations of play within the prefatory

labyrinth.

49
Given Derrida's analysis of the subversive, problematic nature of
prefatory play, Richard P. Blackmur's formal, empirical reading of
James becomes suspect. In his introduction to The Art of Fiction,
Blackmur describes the formal components of a typical James Preface.
The paradigmatic Preface, Blackmur suggests, contains five elements: a
section of autobiography illuminating the conditions under which the
fictional text was composed; a statement of anecdote relating the
evolution of the story's "germ"; the distinguishing features of the

germ; the evolution of the germ; and a technical exposition of the

21
narrative. In James s prefatory remarks Blackmur finds a demonstra-
tion of an artist's consciousness, a dedication to empirical represen-
tation. Most critics subscribe to Blackmur's readings.

In his essay "Henry James in Reality," James E. Miller, Jr.
disagrees, however, presenting a persuasive case for revising Jamesian
poetics. The James revealed in the theory, he argues, is not at all the

stiff prescriptivist. Instead, he is "one of the most ingeniously flex-

22
ible of fictional theorists"; like Whitman, he contains multitudes.

Miller attributes our cartoon fat-headed James to wrong-headed critics
who have for one reason or another perpetrated lies. James's theory
itself seems to warn against the logical fallacy of card-stacking, that
is, choosing only the details from the Prefaces that reinforce precon-
ceptions, because, again like Whitman, James contradicts himself. As
Miller notes in his earlier Theory of Fiction: Henry James, James
believed both that a moral sense was primary to reading and interpreta-
tion, and that a moral sense was unnecessary: that intellectual, logi-

cal , and analytical capacities were what counted. In "The Future of

50
the Novel" James asserts the freedom accruing to both novel and novel-
ist: the novel "moves in a luxurious independence of rules and restric-
tions. Think as we may, there is nothing we can mention as a consid-
eration outside itself with which it must square, nothing we can name
as one of its peculiar obligations or interdictions." The flexi-
bility provided for in James i an poetics and James's own recognition of
the complexity of using language cast needed light on the myth of
Jamesian method, Miller believes.

Ann Jefferson has also taken exception to the largely Aristotelian
interpretation of James's theoretical discourse, whereby James becomes
the champion of "consciousness" and "form." While she admits to James's
concern with finding appropriate narrators for his fictions, she claims
that the Prefaces do not suggest pat answers. "For James himself his

narrative strategies did not constitute a set of dogmatic proposals

concerning the realism of his fiction." Jefferson them compares James

to Andre Gide, a great admirer of James and a novel istic innovator in
his own right. Gide, too, proposed a narrative strategy of presenting
his audience with a reflector: '"An angry man tells a story; there is
the subject of a book. A man telling a story is not enough; it must be
an angry man, and there must be a constant connection between his anger

Of.

and the story he tells." Jefferson's purpose in drawing the parallel
is to demonstrate that both writers use the narrative tactic for formal
efficiency rather than for increased "realism." "Neither James nor
Gide," she concludes, "was responsible for what Wayne Booth has since

called the 'general rules' of modern fiction for which they are both

27
seen as providing textbook examples."

51
Along with Derrida's exemplary questioning of the preface, both
Miller and Jefferson set a precedent by challenging the Blackmurian
Preface readers. By raising inconsistencies in the theoretical dis-
course itself and thus poking holes in the received view, they encour-
age further reevaluation of James's theory. We will follow their cues
by examining the Prefaces as a descriptive rather than a prescriptive
narrative, whose threads include extended discussions of language,
text, (in general and, collapsing Barthes' distinction, more specific-
ally the novelistic genre), and the roles of writer and reader.

In "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences" Derrida discusses the impossibility of totalization in a
system of differance:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not
because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by
a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the
nature of the field--that is, language and a finite
language — excludes totalization. This field is in effect
that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite sub-
stitutions only because it is finite, that is to say,
because instead of being an inexhaustible field, as in
the classical hypothesis, instead of being too large,
there is something missing from it: a center which
arrests and grounds the play of substitutions. 28

His field or universe of infinite substitution is language, as it is for
other post-structuralists. Since language is the writer's donnee, we
must not, as James declares in "The Art of Fiction," deny him it.™
This language does not become intelligible via a simple one-to-one rela-
tionship between signifier and signified, with signifier understood as
the one-way ticket to ultimate meaning, consciousness, or presence,
depending on the preferred vocabulary. Language itself is primary,
producing meaning through its differential relationship with other words.

Such is the basic definition of difference attributed to Ferdinand de
Saussure and his proponents. Derrida, however, rejects Saussure's def-
inition which derives from Cartesian metaphysics, from the binary
opposition he cites between lanque and parole, an opposition between
origin and manifestation that Derrida would not recognize. Insisting,
instead, that this difference is neither word nor concept but juncture
of forces, Derrida chooses to spell the form "diffeVance" with an a^
to emphasize the simultaneous properties of differing and deferring. ^
Roland Barthes uses the concept to define, in part, what he sees to be
the post-structuralist project: "to postulate that each text, in other
words, must be treated in its difference, 'difference1 being understood
here precisely in a Nietzschean or a Derridean sense. . . . the text
... is not the parole of a narrative langue.

James seems to anticipate post-structuralist notions of the lin-
guistic field in remarks he makes in his theoretical discourse.
Acknowledging the donnee and assessing the field, James notes in a
letter to Hugh Walpole: "Form alone takes, and holds and preserves,
substance — saves it from the welter of helpless verbiage that we swim
in as in a sea of tasteless tepid pudding. "32 Although James's
conscious intent is to ridicule writers of "large loose baggy
monsters," the producers of "the perfect paradise of the loose end,"*"
his language betrays a deeper insight. Very early in his career he had
written "All writing is narration." Conversely, all narration, speech,
story-telling, is writing, language, helpless verbiage, and form is
arbitrarily imposed. James's clear recognition of his field suggests an
understanding of the differential production of meaning, which is, in

53
fact, demonstrated throughout the Prefaces and the novels. For example,
in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, James says: "Really, universally,
relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is

eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which

34
they shall happily appear to do so." The novel that follows that

Preface dramatizes the fate of the artist who cannot plot effectively

his circle. Roderick, a young American sculptor given by nature to

extravagance, goes to Europe to develop his talent, but instead of

working in his studio, he spends his patron's money on debauchery.

When he meets the equally extravagant femme- fatal e Christina Light, his

fate is sealed. Roderick either falls or jumps to his death from an

Alpine cliff, lured by the freedom of the abyss, as Derrida's translator

says, "intoxicated with the prospect of never hitting bottom."

Recognizing that differance is unarrestable, the writer must force

closure and arbitrarily stop the deferment at a chosen point or points.

A passage in the Preface to The Awkward Age describing the evolution of

the project of that novel hints at that knowledge:

I remember that in sketching my project for the conductors
of the periodical I have named I drew on a sheet of paper--
and possibly with an effect of the cabalistic, it now comes
over me, that even anxious amplification may nave but vainly
attenuated—the neat figure of a circle consisting of a
number of small rounds disposed at equal distance around a
central object. The central object was my situation, my
subject in itself, to which the thing would owe its title,
and the small rounds represented so many distinct lamps,
as I liked to call them, the function of each of which
would be to light with all due intensity one of its aspects.
I had divided it, didn't they see? into aspects—uncanny as
the little term might sound (though not for a moment did I
suggest we should use it for the public), and by that sign
we would conquer. 36

54
The plan is the James prototype. The central object is that situation,
the Jamesian unstable consciousness constituted (in the metaphysics of
differance) by language. The small distinct lamps surround the situa-
tion lighting one of its aspects. James himself notes the uncanny use
of that term, suggesting its inappropriateness as general linguistic
currency. A close consideration reveals his point: the word "aspect"
carries with it notions of "mental looking," raising questions of
consciousness, which, in James, are always filtered through language.
Another major meaning of the word, moreover, regards appearance: of
expression, object, circumstance, especially to the consciousness.
While James appears to be describing a method for representing lighted
reality, truth, he is really insisting on its (and his own) artificial-
ity and its impossibility by his purposeful use of the word "aspect,"
which decenters that apparently clear meaning. The sketch he draws for
his publishers should appear cabalistic, for indeed it is "intriguing":
both eliciting fascination and involved in secret entanglements.

Such a strategy makes for a text of seamless surface covering an
abyss of ambiguity. Throughout the Prefaces James refers to those
consequences of working with language. For instance, in his Preface to
The American, he writes: "Nothing here is in truth 'offered' --everything

•57

is evaded, and the effect of this, I recognise, is of the oddest."
In noting that "everything," which I take to mean "meaning," is always,
evaded, in other words deferred, James insists on the differential
production of meaning. In his Preface to The Princess Casamassima James
further suggests his subversive approach to definitive meaning. That
novel presents Hyacinth Robinson, the central consciousness, involved

55
in a revolutionary plot. James comments: "He listens anxiously to the
charge — nothing can exceed his own solicitude for an economy of
interest; but feels himself all in presence of an abyss of ambigui-
ties." Hyacinth, a consciousness, a bookbinder, a purveyor of revolu-
tionary rhetoric, given his linguistic being, can do nothing less. The
text concerns his experience, which James defines as "our apprehension
and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures — an intelli-
gent report of which has to be based on that apprehension. As a
report, experience is language, subject to differance. The surface
story is all most readers recognize. The discourse of a James novel,
however, though essential, is almost always ignored. James remarks in
the Preface to The Princess Casamassima: "Possible stories, presentable
figures, rise from the thick jungle as the observer moves, fluttering
up like startled game, and before he knows it indeed he has fairly to
guard himself against the brush of importunate wings. He goes on as
with his head in a cloud of humming presences." Hyacinth, James con-
tinues, sprang from the pavement--the universe of language from which

consciousness springs. In other Prefaces James relates similar stories:

41
The Spoils of Poynton glimmered before him in the space of ten words;

"Pandora" developed from "one of the scantiest of memoranda, twenty

42
words jotted down in New York." In these few words lurked "the stray

suggestion, the wandering word, the vague echo," the germ opening into

the linguistic field. Following the pattern of other novels, Poynton,

James explains, grew from "a single small seed, a seed as minute and

wind-blown . . . dropped unwittingly by my neighbour, a mere floating

particle in the stream of talk." Likewise, The Ambassadors sprang

straight from a dropped grain of suggestion.

"Seed" is a crucial term here, suggesting, as several critics have
noted, James's romantic intertexts. To support their Coleridgean notions
of Jamesian form, they further light on a passage in the Preface to The
Tragic Muse where James confesses his delight "in a deep-breathing
economy and an organic form." James's references to germs and seeds,
however, can also be read as anticipating post-structuralist commentary
on the disseminating nature of textuality and of meaning itself.
Seed can be planted, for example, in a garden, according to a plan, or
it can be the result of a plant "gone to seed," — like the seed of The
Spoils of Poynton--ripe for dissemination by the wind.

Derrida, too, treats the organic image of the seed or germ, most
thoroughly in Dissemination. First, there was retrospectively postu-
lated "'primitive' mythical unity," he explains. As a result of the
shot/throw/blow [le coup] destroying unity, the seed is parted and pro-
jected, inscribing differance in the heart of life. From that time,

"no thing is complete in itself, and it can only be completed by what

48
it lacks." Derrida continues by employing characteristic sexual and

agricultural images:

Germination, dissemination. There is no first insemina-
tion. The semen is already swarming. The "primal"
insemination is dissemination. A trace, a graft whose
traces have been lost. Whether in the case of what is
called "language" (discourse, text, etc.) or in the case
of some "real" seed-sowing, each term is indeed a germ,
and each germ a term. The term, the atomic element,
engenders by division, grafting, proliferation. It is a
seed and not an absolute term. But each germ i_s_ its
own term, finds its term not outside itself but within
itself as its own internal limit, making an angle with its
own death. 49

57
What this all means, if indeed, as Derrida says, it were intended to
mean something, is that nothing exists prior to division: "no simple
originary unit prior to this division through which life comes to see
itself and the seed is multiplied from the start; nothing comes before

the addition in which the seed begins by taking itself away. . . .
Later in the essay, Derrida comments on his own attending discourse on
Phillipe Sollers' Numbers and on attending discourse in general. The
narrative voice in such discourse, like James's Prefaces, is an "I"
"that is both part of the spectacle and part of the audience." It
functions as a "pure passageway for operations of substitution. . . .
A term and a germ, a term that disseminates itself, a germ that carries

its own term within it. Strengthening its breath with its death. The

51
seed is sealed; the sperm, firm." Returning yet again to the prefa-
tory problematic, we can conclude that the preface is a sort of proto-
seed, semen "just as likely to be left out, to well up and get lost as
a seminal differance, as it is to be reappropriated into the sublimity

of the father." Lost in seminal differentiation/dissemination, the word

52
of the father "assisting and admiring his work," loses its breath.

Read in a deconstructive light, James's many "organic" references
to germs, seeds, and grains also problematize the notion of fatherhood
and of James as the inseminator, since James's prefatory seeds (both
those named in the Prefaces and those provided by the Prefaces them-
selves) disseminate, subverting the organic plan and denying him as
origin of the seed. The term/germ, "strengthening its breath with its
death," effaces itself in the Jamesian novel becoming a mere trace. As
James comments in his Preface to The Spoils of Poynton:

If life, presenting us the germ, and left merely to
herself in such a business, gives the case away, almost
always, before we can stop her, what are the signs for
our guidance, what the primary laws for a saving selec-
tion, how do we know when and where to intervene, where
do we place the beginnings of the wrong or the right
deviation? Such would be the elements of an enquiry
upon which, I hasten to say, it is quite forbidden me
here to embark. 53

Answers to the inquiry are unlocatable within the labyrinth, recoverable
only within a fixed, centered system. If James could provide them, he
would be, as many have read him, the Aristotle of a fictional (not dra-
matic) poetics. James, however, admits: "The answer may be after all
that mysteries here elude us, that general considerations fail or mis-
lead, and that even the fondest of artists need ask no wider range than

54
the logic of the particular case." The signs, along with the germs,

are disseminated, leading nowhere. This deconstructive reading of

James's use of his germs also alters "historical" Henry James: once

we recognize his own renouncement of creation ex nihil o, we must credit

him with more modesty than we had previously. Although he does not use

jargon like "deja-ecrit," he points repeatedly to the already-written

character of his novel istic ideas.

As the already-written, disseminating germ grows into a text, it

passes through the author's consciousness and is further diffused in the

flow of language. James recognizes in the Preface to The Lesson of the

Master: "We can surely account for nothing in the novelist's work that

has n't passed through the crucible of the imagination, has n't, in that

perpetually simmering cauldron his intellectual pot-au-feu been reduced

to savoury fusion." The consciousness, the imagination, of both James

and his characters, is the traditional center of the Jamesian poetic,

59
the center that inevitably becomes decentered in deconstructive criti-
cism. Critics like Richard P. Blackmur ascribing to the metaphysics
of presence, see the writer as an inviolable consciousness, his
intelligence as generating language and art. A system of differance,
however, rereads the writer's consciousness as a determination and
effect within a system which is no longer that of presence but that of
differance. Paul de Man comments:

The trend in Continental criticism . . . represents a
methodologically motivated attack on the notion that a
literary or poetic consciousness is in any way a privi-
leged consciousness, whose use of language can pretend to
escape, to some degree, from the duplicity, the confu-
sion, the untruth that we take for granted in the everyday
use of language. 57

Not only is the literary consciousness not privileged, it is non-
existent without the text. As Michel Foucault states in "What is an
Author?":

the author is not an indefinite source of significations
which fill a work; the author does not precede the works,
he is a certain functional principle by which, in our
culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by
which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipu-
lation, the free composition, decomposition, and recompo-
sition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to
presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging
of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him
function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say
that the author is an ideological product, since we
represent him as the opposite of his historically real
function. (When a historically given function is repre-
sented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological
production.) The author is therefore the ideological
figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the
proliferation of meaning. 58

In other words, recent literary theory redefines the cog i to, the motto

of logocentric metaphysics, as a function of discourse rather than the

other way around. "The self is a linguistic construction,"

J. Hillis Miller explains, "rather than being the given, the rock, a
solid point de depart."5

James seems to reflect a system of differance and the position of
de Man, Foucault, and Miller regarding the writer and his place in the
text. Indeed, James seems to anticipate Foucault1 s description of the
author as "a certain functional principle by which . . . one limits,
excludes, and chooses" with his metaphor of the novelist as window. For
a window is in fact a functional principle of any house: it can be
opened or closed to limit or exclude snow and rain. A favorite figure,
the window appears in James's critical discourse more often than the
one occasion everyone remembers — in the Preface to The Portrait of a
Lady where the house of fiction is said to have a million. For example,
in an 1890 letter to W. D. Howell s, James writes: "The novelist is a
particular window, absolutely—and of worth in so far as he is one. °
Again the metaphor appears in a 1905 essay on Balzac: "we thus walk
with him in the great glazed gallery of his thought; the long, lighted
and pictured ambulatory where the endless series of windows, on one
side, hangs over his revolutionized . . . garden of France. . . .'
Even the most perceptive critics use such citations to ballast tradi-
tional discussions of Jamesian point of view. For example, James E.
Miller, Jr. says of James:

The novelist never really looked on "reality bare," but
always through the frame created by his unique conscious-
ness— that consciousness shaped by the stored impressions,
in process of transfiguration, in their obscure catalytic
relations with each other, by the imagination. Moreover,
the consciousness places boundaries on reality, like a
window frame. To "look on reality bare" would be merely
to surrender to its meaningless flux and patternless
chaos. To look at reality through the frame of one's

consciousness is to frame reality with an individual
(unique) point of view--the ultimate source of all
interest in fiction. 62

A window, these critics claim, suggests an ordered, limited perspective,
a circumscription of the reader's view by the writer. On the contrary,
we recall that the window is a function of the house: without the house,
the window is meaningless. The house defines the window. Further, the
window, lest we forget, is composed of two major parts, the glass pane
and the frame. The glass is transparent: we can believe it does not
exist, as those who have walked into plate windows will testify. A clear
window limits the reader's view not in the slightest: it brings the
outside in and vice-versa, nullifying the boundary between them, recall-
ing the inside/outside problematic of the preface discussed by Derrida
in "Hors livre."

What limits James's window, any window, is a frame, in Derrida's
terms, a parergon. In his essay "The Parergon," Derrida cites Immanuel
Kant's definition of the frame as stated in the Critique of Judgment:

"Even what is called ornamentation [Zierathen: decoration,
ornamentation, adornment] (parerga), i.e. what is only an
adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete
representation of an object, in augmenting the delight of
taste does so solely by means of its form. Thus it is
with the frame [Einfassungen] of pictures or the drapery
on statues or the colonnades of palaces. "^3

After citing Kant, Derrida offers his own definition: "A parergon is

against, beside, and above the ergon, the work accomplished, the

accomplishment of the work. But it is not incidental; it is connected

to and cooperates in its operation from the outside."" It attains,

he concludes, the status of a philosophical concept, designating "a

general formal predicative structure which may be carried over, either

intact or consistently deformed, reformed, to other fields, where new

contents may be submitted to it. 5 "The Parergon inscribes something

extra, exterior to the specific field." In his discussion Derrida

illustrates his position(s) using the drapery on Greek statues and the

columns supporting buildings as parergonal examples. In each case the

parergon violently separates the work from the "other"; however, in

wrenching the two, the parergon becomes self-effacing. Derrida explains:

The parergon is distinguished from both the ergon
(the work) and the milieu; it is distinguished as a
figure against a ground. But it is not distinguished
in the same way as the work, which is also distinguished
from a ground. The parergonal frame is distinguished
from two grounds, but in relation to each of these, it
disappears into the other. In relation to the work,
which may function as its ground, it disappears into
the wall and then, by degrees, into the general context.
In relation to the general context, it disappears into
the work. Always a form on a ground, the parergon is
nevertheless a form which has traditionally been deter-
mined not by distinguishing itself, but by disappearing,
sinking in, obliterating itself, dissolving just as it
expends its greatest energy. The frame is never a ground
in the way the context or the work may be, but neither does
its marginal thickness form a figure. 67

In such a way, we can understand James's intertexts as his parerga,

his frames invisibly mediating between the window and the house: James

and his fiction. Each intertext of the house of fiction, be it Eliot or

Emerson, sits against, beside, and above James, the transparent window,

the ergon. From that rather ambiguous position, the intertexts are

connected and operate on both James and his texts, for it is not clear

whether the frame properly "belongs" to the architectural structure or

to the glass window. Indeed, the intertexts function as a frame, "the

general formal predictative structure," which is consistently deformed

and reformed depending on the window. In so functioning, they disappear,

as Derrida says, "into the wall and then, by degrees,!' nto the general

context." James is the window, his intertexts the parerga, his frames.
To say then that the house of fiction has a million windows is not to
assert 1000x1000 points of view; rather, it is to admit to intertex-
tuality and to the transparency of the writer's language.

By virtue of a metonymic slide from window/frame and author/inter-
text, the text/preface problematic is put in perspective. The Preface,
in the New York Edition, before Blackmur's reassembling of them, is a
parergon framing the text, dividing the text from the outside. Obviously
extrinsic, the parergonal Preface nonetheless disappears into the
textual fabric. "Hors livre" yet "dans livre," preface yet postface,
the James Preface gives entry to the linguistic labyrinth, creates
aporia — an ultimate, dead-end undecidability. As parergon, it "warps
as it works,"58 "warp" meaning not only to twist or distort, but also,
in the weaving of textiles, to arrange. Given the ambiguous nature of
the preface, the arrangement created by it is, as Derrida comments,
fragile. The fragile, tenuous character of the Prefaces as we now
understand them subverts the reading received via Blackmur, supports
some of James Miller's efforts, and encourages continued revision.

As we slide backwards for a moment on the metonymic axis, from the
text/preface relationship to that between the author and the intertext,
James himself is redefined. As the frame limits a window and the prefa-
tory parergon artificially arranges, imposes "restraints upon a
discourse which continuously threatens to exceed its boundaries," the
intertexts--both the precursor texts and the critical readings of the
text itself—define, in a fundamental way, the author. They write him.
As once critic demonstrated, to know "Shakespeare" is not only

impossible but useless. We can only know Shakespeare as he was read/
written by progressive centuries. Likewise, James is read and written
by each generation, and academics who claim that a historical "James"
exists should revise their assumptions to suggest that it is instead
their reading that creates that James.

Confessing himself as "written" rather than as "writer," James
heralds contemporary critical theory. For example, in the Preface to
The Tragic Muse, he says that the writer's romance is the romance he
himself projects, thus describing himself in textual terms. Reinforcing
this suggestion, he repudiates custody of his fiction in a later
comment: "I can but look on the present fiction as a poor fatherless
and motherless, a sort of unregistered and unacknowledged birth. "°"
Given his denial of parenthood, any Henry James we would know via that
text would be a writer we and the intertexts collaborated on to produce.
James's suggestion of his text's orphaned state recalls Barthes's
concept of the fatherless text in "The Death of the Author," a concept
challenged on small points yet upheld on larger ones in Foucault's "What
is an Author?".

The way we know an author, James continues, is through his taste, a
function basic to his existence. As James says: "The 'taste' of the
poet is, at bottom and so far as the poet in him prevails over every-
thing else, his active sense of life."™ James's deliberate (as indi-
cated by the quotation marks) choice here of the word "taste" is telling
since gauging a writer's taste is somewhat ambiguous. Taste may suggest
discernment of possible intertexts, perception of other art, music, or
literature a writer enjoys. Thus, in identifying a writer's taste, the

namer is immediately cast into the maze of language. As James says,

by naming a writer's taste we "hold the silver clue to the whole

labyrinth of his consciousness.' In the written, then, we find not

only the author, but also, by discerning his taste, we gain entry into

the linguistic labyrinth of differance.

A passage in the Preface to The Spoils of Poynton both elaborates

and sums up James's positions on the author vis-a-vis his subject:

That [James's habit of creating from character rather than
from plot] points, I think, to a large part of the very
source of interest for the artist: it resides in the
srong [sic] consciousness of his seeing all for himself.
He has to borrow his motive, which is certainly half the
battle; and this motive is his ground, his site and his
foundation. But after that he only lends and gives, only
builds and piles high, lays together the blocks quarried
in the deeps of his imagination and on his personal
premises. 72

The novelist is a bricoleur, constructing text from intertexts, those
blocks, though quarried in his imagination, his linguistic consciousness,
which are part and parcel of the already- written.

Our altered view of the writer necessitates a revised definition of
his primary product, in James's case, the novel. In traditional criti-
cisms the novel is a fictional narrative of life or experience. A
realistic novel is, as Stendhal put it, "a mirror walking along a main
road.' James, too, adopts the mirror image in "The Future of the
Novel": "Till the world is an unpeopled void there will be an image in
the mirror." In a logocentric metaphysical universe, that image is an
accurate representation of the world inhabited by the reader. In a
system of differance, however, the image is created by the reader in his
interaction with the text: if the novel is a mirror at all, it is not

the reflecting kind: rather, it is the sort of mirror that lures us

into the abyss, as in Alice Through the Looking-Glass or in Derrida's

Dissemination.

Derrida cites Alice early in his "Dissemination" essay as an

example of that phenomenon:

Because it begins by repeating itself, such an event
at first takes the form of a story. Its first time takes
place several times. Of which, one, among others, is the
last. Numerous and plural in every strand of its (k)nots
(that is, (k)not any subject, (k)not any object, (k)not
any thing), this first time already is not from around
here, no longer has a here and now; it breaks up the
complicity of belonging that ties us to our habitat, our
culture, our simple roots. "In our country," says Alice,
"there's only one day at a time." Hence it would seem
that what is foreign would have to reside in repetition.

The text is born of the disseminating seed of repetition shot through a
mirror, a "chimera" existing between the so-called primary text and the
miming text, "the presentation, commentary, interpretation, review,
account or inventory" — the attending discourse. The fate of the mirror,
which presents the presence of the present, is to be broken, "but it
will reflect that breaking in a fiction that remains intact and unin-
terrupted.' Both primary and attending discourse calculate and feign
self-presentation and inscribe presence, but the mirror reflects
neither: it is a false exit, offering only the sight of its own tain,
its own thick reflective foil. The tain, however, is transparent "or
rather transformative of what it lets show through." Derrida explains:

The tain in this mirror thus reflects — imperfectly — what comes to
it--imperfectly — . . . and lets through — presently — the ghost
of what it reflects, the shadow deformed and reformed accord-
ing to the figure of what is called present: the upright
fixity of what stands before me; "the inscriptions . . .
appear inverted, righted, fixed. "78

The mirror becomes a screening device whereby images and persons are

transformed and permuted, and no writing escapes its effects:

No statement can be sheltered, like a fetish, a commodity
invested with value, even potentially "scientific" value,
from these mirror effects through which the text quotes,
quotes itself, sets itself in motion of its own accord,
through a generalized graph that undoes all certainty
derived from the oppositions between value and nonvalue,
respectable and nonrespectable, true and false, high and
low, inside and outside, whole and part. All these
oppositions are thrown out of whack by the simple "taking-
place" of the mirror. Each term takes over the other and
excludes itself from itself; each germ becomes steadier and
deader than itself. The element envelops and deducts
itself from what it envelops. The world comprehends the
mirror which captures it and vice versa. 79

By virtue of the mirror, another version of differance, then, writing

does not, cannot reflect. The image in the mirror, the language of the

text, is transformed as it is written and read and written again. In

another sense, too, the mirror, the novel, is the window in the house of

fiction, for, depending on the direction of the light source, a window

can act as a mirror. Thus, again, the mirror — the novel — is the window —

the author. The writer is written.

Recent theorists have chosen other metaphors as well to account

for textuality. Roland Barthes, in The Pleasure of the Text, comments:

"we are now emphasizing in the tissue, the generative idea that the text

is made, is worked out in a perpetual interweaving."ou Derrida, too,
insists upon the woven nature of texts. As his translator Alan Bass
notes in his introduction to Writing and Difference: "these essays
always affirm that the 'texture' of texts makes any assemblage of them

a 'basted' one, i.e., permits only the kind of fore-sewing that empha-

81
sizes the necessary spaces between even the finest stitching." Each

text, composed as it is of already-written, differential language,

68
contains other texts. Theorists call this "intertextuality." John
Carlos Rowe explains that "intertextuality does not indicate merely the
strategy of reading one text with another, but the fact that every

text is itself already an intertextual event. . . . the text is not

82
itself.' Julia Kristeva provides another metaphor calling the text a

mosaic of citations, a fitting rather than a weaving together of dis-

83
parate elements. But whether we figure the author as mosaicist,

architect, tailor, or bricoleur, the text, for structuralists and post-
structuralists, still displays its assembled character.

James's metaphors of text as house and as mirror are celebrated as
is comparison of the text to a painting. He refers to a novel as an
"admirably treacherous picture of actual manners."^ This description,
like the others, has been seized upon by traditionalists to support
their contentions that James is the supreme realist painting a faithful
portrait of life. A deconstructive approach, however, would note that
"treacherous" designates a deceptive, untrustworthy, unreliable picture,
the only one possible given the nature of the paints.

Another Jamesian metaphor for textual ity, one which receives con-
siderably less attention than the architectural or artistic images,
further suggests the appropriateness of a deconstructive reading of the
novels. For example, Barthes would have approved James's project as he
describes it using a fabric metaphor in Essays in London and Elsewhere:

... We are weaving our work together, and it goes on for
ever, and it's all one mighty loom . . . And the tissue
grows and grows, and we weave into it all our lights and
our darkness, all our quarrels and reconciliations, all
our stupidities and our strivings, all the friction of
our intercourse, and all the elements of our fate. The
tangle may seem great at times, but it is all an immea-
surable pattern, a spreading many-coloured figure. 85

A passage in the Preface to Roderick Hudson also employs the fabric

metaphor, figuring the text as "the canvas of life" and the writer,

specifically young James but generally anyone, as the embroiderer, who

works "in terror, fairly, of the vast expanse of that surface, of the

boundless number of its distinct perforations for the needle, and of

the tendency inherent in his many-coloured flowers and figures to cover

and consume as many as possible of the little holes." James continues

by suggesting the differing, deferring, and disseminating quality of

text:

The development of the flower, of the figure, involved thus
an immense counting of holes and a careful selection among
them. That would have been, it seemed to him, a brave
enough process, were it not the very nature of the holes so
to invite, to solicit, to persuade, to practise positively
a thousand lures and deceits. The prime effect of so
sustained a system, so prepared a surface, is to lead on
and on. 87

Derrida's "De la verite en pointure" offers itself as a tailor-made

intertext to James's discussion in the Preface to Roderick Hudson.

Derrida, too, notes the subversive nature of the distinct perforations,

the process he calls "pointure." Pointure is both a printer's term,

denoting both a pointed iron plate that fixes the sheet to be printed on

the tynpan, and the hole that plate makes in the paper, and a glover's

and cobbler's term naming the number of stitches, thus the size of a

shoe or a pair of gloves. These definitive holes in every text create a

problematic space, a gap in which attribution takes place.00

The pointing, the embroidery of the already-woven canvas (language/
the deja-ecrit) is indeed, as James suggests, treacherous, misleading us
at every turn. James offers his readers the help of ficelles, a group

70
of characters who often act as catalysts, foils, interpreters, or, in
the case of the BBC Production of The Golden Bowl , narrator. Literally
a thread, the ficelle often "bastes," to use Bass's term, Jamesian texts
together. In attempting to smooth the seams, she reveals the gaps that
have necessitated her existence. She acts like the lace in "Restitu-
tions," which couples Van Gogh's painted shoes and the feet of the
painter. Susan Stringham and Maria Gostrey, whose names, in suggesting
"string" and "gossamer," imply threading and metonymically sewing, act,
in Derrida's terms, as parerga, out-of-work supplements, not, as James
himself admits, part of the text proper. "They may run beside the
coach," but they may not so much as get their foot on the step: they
are destined to "tread the dusty road."°^ Derrida's outline of the
movement of the lace traces the function of each of James's ficelles:
"It cuts out but also sews up again. With an invisable lace which
perforates the canvas (as la pointure, the "tympan spur," "perforates
the paper"), it passes in then out of the canvas to sew it up again in
its middle, in its internal worlds." The ficelles as a group are
considered to be characteristically Jamesian in conception and function.
As the function of the pointure, they attribute the text to James.
Moreover, they serve as a metonym for the woven texture of Jamesian
narrative, a texture we will examine as it manifests itself in the
preceding chapters on The American, The Spoils of Poynton, and The Wings
of the Dove.

Throughout his theoretical discourse, James continually reasserts
the differential character of the woven text. In the Preface to The
Portrait of a Lady, he makes an ado of calling the novel istic form just

71
that: "The novel is of its very nature an 'ado,1 an ado about some-
thing, and the larger the form it takes the greater of course the

90
ado.' The novel, he suggests, is an exercise in deferment: the more

elaborate the supplementarity, (the longer the novel), the more dilatory
the effect. Because of its dilatory character, the novel is decentered.
Regardless of what Blackmur says about the central ity of a central
intelligence, James himself notes the decentered nature of his texts
in the Preface to The Tragic Muse: "I urge myself to the candid con-
fession that in wery few of my productions, to my eye, has the organic
centre succeeded in getting into proper position. "y The language has
a mind, a consciousness so to speak, of its own. James continues:

In several of my compositions this displacement has so
succeeded, at the crisis, in defying and resisting me, has
appeared so fraught with probable dishonour, that I still
turn upon them, in spite of the greater or less success
of final dissimulation, a rueful and wondering eye. These
productions have in fact, if I may be so bold about it,
specious and spurious centres altogether, to make up for
the failure of the true. 92

In older criticisms, where the author is perceived as generating

meaning through his conscious use of language, the audience is understood

as a passive sponge soaking up as much meaning as possible: the better,

more "thorough" the reader, the bigger, more absorbant the sponge. Once

we deny the writer's ability to create ex nihilo and recognize him

instead as a function of the text, we must, necessarily recast the role

of the reader. Reading can become a broadly economic event, with the

reader as investor, as Seymour Chatman implies:

Whether the narrative is experienced through a performance
or through a text, the members of the audience must respond
with an interpretation: they cannot avoid participating in

the transaction. They must fill in gaps with essential
or likely events, traits, and objects which for various
reasons have gone unmentioned.93

Other recent critics see the project of reading as more far-reaching

that a single transaction. John Carlos Rowe, for example, understands

the event in epic terms: "the reader's voyage is a quest, an active

engagement of the language of the work and a creative transposition of

that language into the forms for his own understanding. "^ The reader,

then, becomes writer. Because reading, like writing, filters through

language, interpretation cannot determine final meaning, the frequent

aim of criticism based on a metaphysics of logos: Rather, reading, in

a system of differance, denies such closure, focusing instead on the

"differences between texts, the relations of proximity and distance, of

citation, negation, irony and parody. Such relations are infinite and

95
work to defer final meaning."

A school of criticism focusing on the primary role of the reader in
the production of meaning has grown up in the last decade. Labeled
"reader response critics," theorists like Stanley Fish and Wolfgang Iser
believe that the literary work exists in the convergence of text and
reader. The text is dynamic, and the reader, in the process of recrea-
tion, causes the text to reveal "its potential multiplicity of connec-

96
tions." Like structuralists and post-structuralists, reader response

criticism recognizes intertextuality as a component of the recreation

process. "The product of this creative activity is what we might call

the virtual dimension of the text, which endows it with its reality.

This virtual dimension is not the text itself, nor is it the imagination

97
of the reader: it is the coming together of text and imagination."

73
More radical in their ideologies, structuralists and post-structuralists
would claim instead that it is in the free-play of the language of the
text and imagination that meaning is deferred.

James, along with structuralists, post-structuralists, and reader-
response critics, affirms the productive role of the reader and the
responsibility of the reader to accept that role. He was not referring
only to those works produced by George Eliot when he wrote in his
review in Partial Portraits: "In every novel the work is divided

between the writer and the reader.' James insists, Walter Benn
Michaels believes, on the responsibility of readers as writers in his
Preface to The Golden Bowl . In "Writers Reading: James and Eliot,"
Michaels understands James as implying that by definition reading is "a
form of self-projection, and hence we are responsible not simply to our
texts but for them since, at the crudest level, they are us."99 Accord-
ing to Michaels, James sets up a model of reading in that Preface that
presages the reader-response paradigm: "James' account, in its most
extreme form, insist [sic] that the text is a blank page inscribed
with the reader's own desires. Hence it locates meaning not in texts
but in readers, whose activity is creative."

In a reciprocal event, the writer reads, becomes the audience. As
James says in the Preface to The Princess Casamassima: "The teller of
a story is primarily, none the less, the listener to it, the reader of
it, too." In fact, one of James's most characteristic stands in the
Prefaces is taken on the role of the writer, especially the revisionist,
as reader. His serious concern with revising his own work began when
Scribner's approached him with the New York Edition proposal. Upon

74
accepting, James was forced to reread, for the first time, his earliest
works. The sober master then overhauled the novels of the young Henry

James, often, many say, to the detriment of those works. In several

i n?
cases, especially that of Roderick Hudson and The American, James

might have done well to have accepted as implied advice Little Bil ham's

comment on Chad Newsome's altered state in The Ambassadors: "It's like

the new edition of an old book that one has been fond of — revised and

amended, brought up to date, but not quite the thing one knew and

loved."103

In the Preface to the first novel he reread, Roderick Hudson, James

discusses his first revising experience:

I have felt myself then, on looking over past productions,
the painter making use again and again of the tentative
wet sponge. The sunk surface has here and there, beyond
doubt, refused to respond: the buried secrets, the inten-
tions, are buried too deep to rise again, and were indeed,
it would appear, not much worth the burying. Mo [sic] so,
however, when the moistened canvas does obscurely flush and
when resort to the varnish-bottle is thereby immediately
indicated. The simplest figure for my revision of this
present array of earlier, later, larger, smaller, canvases,

is to say that I have achieved it by the very aid of the
varni sh-bottl e J 04

James deconstructs his revisionary efforts here by implying a contempo-
rary view of language, which emphasizes its sedimentation. In the
prudent use of his sponge and varnish bottle, James suggests that he can
reveal meanings concealed in the language of the text. His revision, he
implies, is not so much independent rewriting as re-seeing or recovering
hidden linguistic layers.

James employs another structuralist/post-structuralist strategy in
his Preface to The Golden Bowl , where he treats most fully the project

of revision. Here he employs a tactic associated most closely with

J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida via Heidegger, the approach via

etymology. In this last of the Prefaces, James finally deals directly

with the concept of revision:

Revision had somehow, to my imagination, carried itself--
and from my frivolous failure to analyse the content of
the word. To revise is to see, or to look over, again —
which means in the case of a written thing neither more
nor less than to re-read it. I had attached to it, in a
brooding spirit, the idea of re-writing--with which it
was to have in the event, for my conscious play of mind,
almost nothing in common. I had thought of re-writing
as so difficult, and even so absurd, as to be impossible
--having also indeed, for that matter, thought of re-
reading in the same light. But the felicity under the
test was that where I had thus ruefully pre-figured two
efforts there proved to be but one— and this an effort
but at the first blush. What re-writing might be was to
remain — it has remained for me to this hour — a mystery.
On the other hand the act of revision, the act of seeing
it again, caused whatever I looked at on any page to
flower before me as into the only terms that honourably
expressed it. . . .105

The differences between the first published drafts and the New York re-
visions stopped James quite in his tracks. "This truth," he said,

throws into relief for me the very different dance that
the taking in hand of my earlier productions was to
lead me. ... It was, all sensibly, as if the clear
matter being still there, even as a shining expanse of
snow spread over a plain, my exploring tread, for
application to it, had quite unlearned the old pace
and found itself naturally falling into another. . . .

Had he the vocabulary, James might have noted that in the revision
process he recognized the differential character of language, the free-
play of the signifier. As he says, again in that seminal Preface to
The Golden Bowl : "The deviations and differences might of course not
have broken out at all, but from the moment they began so naturally to
multiply, they became, as I say, my very terms of cognition." IJ/

76
For the New York Edition James also added a series of frontispieces,
photographs by Alvin Langdon Coburn, whose purpose "largely consists in
a 'rendering' of certain inanimate characteristics of London streets."'08
Indeed, the project of the illustrations was to parallel the aim of the
novels: to render. In its differential play, that very term "render"
subverts itself since it means both to send forth and to bring in. A
"rendering" can mean ambiguously both a translation or an interpretation
suggesting the collecting function and a reproduction or representation
suggesting the dispersing function. The Prefaces do render, in both
senses. While gathering up James's body of seemingly prescriptive
poetics, they are all the while "shaking off all shackles of theory."^0'
Like Derrida's notion of prefacing, James's "rendering" is self-subvert-
ing. Rereading the theoretical discourse in this new light leads to the
"rendering" of the loose end. Upon our pulling on it, James's literary
discourse — the differential field of language that comprises it and the
writer, text, and reader within it — unravels.

Notes

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 27, n. 27. .

20ne of the notable exceptions is William R. Goetz, "Criticism and
Autobiography in James's Prefaces," American Literature, 51, No. 3
(1979), 333-348.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Introd.,0f Grammatology by Jacques
Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976),
p. xii.

^Barbara Johnson, Introd., Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. xxxii.

Spivak, p. xii.

Johnson, p. xxxii.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 7.

9Derrida, Dissemination, p. 8.

luDerrida, Dissemination, p. 9.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 9.

1 ?

Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 15-16.

1 3
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 20.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 20.

1 5

Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 20-21.

15Spivak, p. Ixv.

'Derrida, Dissemination, p. 35.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 27, n. 27.

iyDerrida, Dissemination, p. 27, n. 27.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 27, n. 27.

Richard P. Blackmur, Introd., The Art of the Novel , by Henry James

(New York: Scribner's, 1934), pp. ix-x.

22
James E. Miller, Jr., "Henry James in Reality," Critical Inquiry,

2, No. 3 (1976), 585, 600.

James E. Miller, Jr., Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Lincoln:
Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1972), p. 319-320.

Henry James, "The Future of the Novel," in James E. Miller, Jr. Theory
of Fiction: Henry James, p. 340.

"Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), p. 110.

DJefferson, citing Gide, p. 110.

27Jefferson, p. 110.

Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 289.

29Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," in Partial Portraits (1888;
rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1905), p. 394.

"Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison
(Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1973), p. 130.

Roland Barthes, "A Conversation with Roland Barthes," Signs of

the Times (Cambridge: Ganta, 1971), pp. 41-55, cited in Jonathan Culler,
Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975). p. 242.

32James to Walpole, in James E. Miller, Jr., Theory of Fiction: Henry
James, pp. 266-267.

33James, The Art of the Novel , p. 84, p. 114.

JHJames, The Art of the Novel , p. 5.

35Spivak, p. Ixxvii.

36James, The Art of the Novel , pp. 109-110.

37 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 38.

38James, The Art of the Novel , p. 64.

jrJames, The Art of the Novel , pp. 64-65.

40James, The Art of the Novel , p. 60.

41 James, The Art of the Novel , p. 121.

42James, The Art of the Novel , p. 270.

H0James, The Art of the Novel , p. 119.

44James, The Art of the Novel , p. 119.

^James, The Art of the Novel , p. 307.

46James, The Art of the Novel , p. 84.

4'Derrida, Dissemination, p. 304.

4ft

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 304.

4Q
^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 304.

5 Derrida, Dissemination, p. 304.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 325.
52Derrida, Dissemination, p. 44.
53James, The Art of the Novel, pp. 120-121.
54James, The Art of the Novel , p. 121.
55James, The Art of the Novel , p. 230.

JUDernda, Speech and Phenomena, p. 147.

Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1971), pp. 8-9.

Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?", in Textual Strategies, ed.
Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 159.

59J. Hi! lis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II," The
Georgia Review, 30, No. 2 (1976), 345.

fiO

u James E. Miller, Jr., "Henry James in Reality," citing James, 594.

James E. Miller, Jr., "Henry James in Reality," citing James, 594.

James E. Miller, Jr., "Henry James in Reality," 595.
63Jacques Derrida, "The Parergon," October 9 (1979), 18.

64Derrida, "The Parergon," 20.

0JDerrida, "The Parergon," 20.

66Derrida, "The Parergon," 21.

67Derrida, "The Parergon," 25-26.

68Derrida, "The Parergon," 34.

69
James, The Art of the Novel, p. 79.

James, The Art of the Novel , p. 340.

72James, The Art of the Novel , p. 122.

73
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le noir (Paris: Garni er-Flammarion, 1964),

p. 361.

74
James, "The Future of the Novel," in James E. Miller, Jr., Theory

of Fiction: Henry James, p. 343.

75
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 292.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 295.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 314.

78
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 314.

Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 315-316.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller

(New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 64.

81
Alan Bass, Introd., Writing and Difference, by Jacques Derrida

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. xiii-xiv.

8?
John Carlos Rowe, unpublished manuscript, cited in Frank

Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

1981), p. 175.

Julia Kristeva, Semiotike: Recherches pour une semanalyse (Paris:

Seuil, 1969), p. 146.

James, "The Future of the Novel," in James E. Miller, Jr., Theory

of Fiction: Henry James, p. 341.

Henry James, Essays in London and Elsewhere (New York: 1893),
p. 300, cited in Georges Poulet, The Metamorphoses of the Circle, trans.
Carley Dawson and Elliott Coleman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press,
1966), p. 393, n. 9.

James, The Art of Fiction, p. 5.

87
James, The Art of Fiction, pp. 5-6.

88
Jacques Derrida, "Restitution of Truth to Size, De la verite en

pointure," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Research in Phenomenology

(1978), 1-44.

89
James, The Art of Fiction, p. 55.

90
James, The Art of Fiction, p. 48.

91
James, The Art of Fiction, p. 85.

92
James, The Art of Fiction, p. 86.

Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.

Press, 1978), p. 28.

94
John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergence of

a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976),

p. 173.

95Culler, p. 243.

96
Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader (Baltimore and London: Johns

Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974). p. 278.

97Iser, p. 279.

98
Henry James, "George Eliot," in James E. Miller, Jr., Theory of

Fiction: Henry James, p. 321.

99
Walter Benn Michaels, "Writers Reading: James and Eliot," Modern

Language Notes, 91, No. 5 (1976), 838.
100Michaels, 847.

101 James, The Art of the Novel, p. 63.

102

The new Norton Critical Edition of The American, ed. by James W.

Tuttleton, for example, breaks with the general practice of Gregg's

theory of copy text by choosing not the New York Edition but the first

English edition. In his notes Tuttleton presents a persuasive case

for choosing the first English edition as the best available copy text.

1 03

Henry James, The Ambassadors, (New York: Scribner's, 1909), I,

177.

104

James, The Art of the Novel , pp. 11-12.

10^

James, The Art of the Novel , pp. 338-39.

James, The Art of the Novel , p. 336.

82
107James, The Art of the Novel, p. 337.
108James, The Art of the Novel, p. 334.
109James, The Art of the Novel, p. 336.

CHAPTER THREE
DECONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN

"What's the water in French, sir?"

"L'eau," replied Nicholas.

"Ah!" said Mr. Lillyvick, shaking his head mournfully.
"I thought as much. Lo, eh? I don't think anything of
that language—nothing at all."

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

From the beginning, critical debate on The American has seized

upon the issue of vrai semblance. For example, in a review published in

The Nation, May 31, 1877, T. S. Perry complains of the unbel ievabil ity

of Newman's passion for Madame de Cintre: "Now, it is impossible to

suppose that Newman had not his whole heart in this matter. It was the

one love of his life, and all the mothers and brothers in Christendom

would have been no more guard for Madame de Cintre than half a dozen

cobwebs.' Another reviewer, in The Cathol ic World, December 1878,

takes James to task for the implausibility of Newman's project: "The

American, no matter how quickly he makes his money, never thinks of

going away from his own country to get a wife."^ Yet others, mainly

French critics, faulted James's presentation of the Bellegardes and

their milieu as patently unrealistic. Even when, in his Preface to the

New York Edition of The American, James explained that the narrative was

a "romance," and not a realistic "novel," critics did not abandon their

arguments concerning the realistic content of the text. As recently as

1980 James W. Tuttleton described The American as "a novel of manners

84
juxtaposing for analysis the mores of an aristocratic French society
with the comparative mannerlessness of the American traveler in Paris,
specifically a Western businessman who has amassed a sudden fortune and

has come abroad to cultivate aesthetic interests and, it turns out, to

5
find a wife."

Almost invariably, those who asserted the narrative's credibility
deemed it successful, and those who thought their credulity affronted by
an improbable plot gave the novel failing marks. Similarly, those who
found the story consonant with their view of reality found it to be
unified (which is curious since in real life we do not experience
events as organic wholes), and those who found the text unbelievable
also faulted it for lack of unity. That vraisemblance and unity should
go hand in hand is not surprising if one assumes that the primary aim of
the nineteenth-century novel was, in faithfully presenting life, to
mold that experience into an aesthetically satisfying organic whole.

What all of these critics neglect to consider, however, is the sub-
versiveness of the language that constitutes the text, a subversiveness
that undermines all efforts toward "realism" and "unity." They all
assume that language has a strictly representative, referential function.
Whether they judge the text a boom or a bust depends on how willing they
are to accommodate the various discordant elements of the narrative in
order to demonstrate a cohesive, comprehensive unity, which does not
exist except as a product of readings that naturalize the text. And
the degree to which these critics naturalize the text, that is, bring
into line those discordant elements, seems dependent on their accom-
panying assessment of its vraisemblance.

Instead of reading to naturalize the text, however, we may actively
engage the text as an example of ecriture, "writing." In reading a text
as ecriture, we recognize that, as Roland Barthes remarks, "writing
still remains full of the recollection of previous usage, for language
is never innocent: words have a second-order memory which mysteriously
persists in the midst of new meanings."" These second-order meanings,
stubborn after-images resulting from all earlier modes of writing,
supersede the immediate text. Barthes compares the activity of ecriture
to a chemical experiment: "Any written trace precipitates, as inside a
chemical at first transparent, innocent and neutral, mere duration
gradually reveals in suspension a whole past of increasing density,
like a cryptogram." By accepting that texts are a function of ecriture,
we reject the notion that language serves a representative function and
admit that language is subversive: that the second-order meanings will
be revealed "in suspension." In reading, then, we abandon our search
for "meaning," since it is bound to be undercut by other forms of
ecriture. Jonathan Culler defines the activity of reading required by
ecriture: "To read is to participate in the play of the text, to locate
zones of resistance and transparency, to isolate forms and determine
their content and then to treat that content in turn as a form with its
own content, to follow, in short, the interplay of surface and

envelope."

Barthes first defined ecriture in 1953, and since then Jacques
Derrida has altered and expanded the definition so that today a descrip-
tion of ecriture entails not only intertextual ity and the sedimented
nature of language, as Barthes had suggested in his assertion of

86
linguistic corruption by previous usage, but also dissemination.
Writing, as a disseminating activity, is defined by Derrida as "the
impossibility for a chain to stop at a signified (signifie) which does
not restart the chain as a result of the term's already having been
placed in a position of signifying substitution.' Writing, then,
instead of fixing meaning ensures its deferment.

As an effect of the dissemination process, as ecriture, The
American is hardly innocent although traditionaly thematic paradigms
may imply as much. Loose threads, snags, holes exist at the seams,
calling attention to its fabrication, and the "realistic" surface is
pulled apart at the most crucial points to reveal underlying layers
of text. These supplementary layers in turn reveal their own lacunae.
In moving from one layer to another searching for the origin and thus
for meaning, we get lost, somewhat like Newman in the conventions of
French society. We, like he, are deferred, sidetracked again and again,
finally realizing that meaning, which we expect to reside at the origin,
is unattainable because it is unreachable. Originality, and thus ulti-
mate meaning, is declared void both in the presentation of The American
as text and in the presentation of Newman himself, and by the end of
the novel, in the climactic presentation of the murder note, a metaphor
of lost meaning. In the past readers have assumed a palpable meaning
recoverable at a fixed origin, an assumption that has colored their
largely mimetic readings of The American. The text, however, defies
such an assumption and demonstrates itself to be neither realistic,
nor unified, nor original. It demands to be read as ecriture because,
as a result of dissemination, all origins are lost: in the sediment

87
of intertextuality, in the abymes of architecture, in the translation
of language.

Although I assert that origins — in terms of both originary sites
and original ideas--are absent in The American, and that absence sets in
motion the disseminating chain of signification, those early critics who
liked the novel commended it for its novelty. (Originality, of course,
along with vraisemblance and organic unity, is another standard criter-
ion of work in post-Romantic logocentric criticisms.) For example, one
reviewer in The Galaxy, July 1877, wrote: "The plot of 'The American'
has the great merit of originality, and it is well constructed."^ A
review in The Literary World, also in July 1877, echoes the evaluation:
"The American is a very modern novel; with no flavor of the past and no
prophecy of the future. . . .' Twentieth-century critics note James's
debt to earlier works; however, they have maintained their insistance on
the originality of the text and on James's authority. Oscar Cargill, for
instance, cited L'Etrangere, a play by Alexandre Dumas f i 1 s , running at
the Theatre Francais during James's 1876 Paris stay, and an 1858
Turgenev novel, A Nest of Gentlefolk, as the origins of the Jamesian
product. ^ Although he denies the novelty of its imagery and subject
matter, naming racial images, archetypal patterns, and cultural fables
permeating the text, George Knox nonetheless makes The American out to
be original. As romance and cultural parable, the novel is, he
announces, an original effort at The Great American novel.

Source studies, however, while assuming artistic creation and
control, have always undercut notions of originality by calling into
question the fine line between innovation and plagiarism. Recent

88
discussions of influence deriving from, among others, Harold Bloom's
work, have proven to be more feasible explanations of textual evolu-
tion. Such theories have it that literary history is the account of
"misprision," of willful misreading. "Influence, as I conceive it,"
Bloom comments, "means that there are no texts, but only relationships
between texts."14 J. Hill is Miller reiterates Bloom's basic idea by
nullifying the New Critics' insistence on textual integrity: "a
literary text is not a thing in itself, 'organically unified,' but a
relation to other texts which are relations in their turn. The study
of literature is therefore a study of intertextuality."'

Thus the concept of intertextuality defies the artificial bound-
aries established by traditional notions of source, allusion, and
influence. By voiding integrity and insisting upon permeability, inter-
textuality, in fact, renders source, allusion, and influence dead since
they all seek origins. So varied and complex is the intertextual field
of The American, that it suggests itself as the chief feature of the
text. Including artistic and musical as well as literary intertexts,
folklore, myth, and maxims, the vast intertextual field subverts all
expectations of The American's originality. Moreover, the intertexts
reveal spaces in the fabric into which meaning, due to the absence of
origin, is disseminated.

The many intertexts work in myriad ways to reveal the gaps. First
and most simply, by insistently naming other texts and thus implicating
them in the text's production, The American self-consciously announces
its own textual activity. For example, the paintings James names
throughout the novel, especially in the early descriptions of Newman's

89
rambles in the Louvre, are linguistic intertexts although they be writ
in oils. The specific narratives include paintings by Murillo, Raphael,
Titian, and Veronese. All narrate fictions, introducing underlying
layers of meaning, which act like preliminary sketches lurking beneath
the painted surface of a Renaissance canvas: sometimes the sketch is
a precursor of the finished work, sometimes it is a different subject
altogether. For a case in point, the second sentence of the novel has
Newman studying "Murillo's beautiful moon-borne Madonna,"^ certainly
the artists's celebrated "The Immaculate Conception," which portrays an
elaborate figure of the Virgin surrounded by tens of cherubs gazing
every which way in admiration as well as in private thought. Although
the painting provides a narrative intertext, its relationship to the
text of The American is deferred, offering a silence almost even before
the novel begins.

Several musical intertexts similarly present other narratives,
which permeate The American for no other apparent reason than to insist
on its textual nature. Two of Offenbach's light operas, La pomme de
Paris and Gazza Ladra are mentioned, for example, in connection with
opera-loving Lord Deepmere's visit to Paris: "He always went to Ireland
for the fishing, and he came to Paris for the new Offenbach things.
They always brought them out in Dublin, but he couldn't wait" (p. 162).
Significantly, though, these intertexts are ignored by "naturalizing"
critics, for they have little import for The American. Instead of
sounding a reinforcing note, they offer only silence.

Other texts also permeate The American doing little else but re-
iterating its textual character and fulling the textual fabric. The

intertextual warehouse of The American is well-stocked with, for

example, guidebooks (like Baedeker's), hagiographies (we discover these

in a layer of meaning underlying Mademe de Cintre's choice of Veronica

as her name when she takes the veil and her mother's comment that she

would rather see her daughter as Sister Catherine than as Mrs. Newman),

Books of Beauty, feuilletons in the Figaro (not to mention innumerable

newspaper accounts narrated by M. Nioche in his effort to teach Newman

French), legends (Newman is perceived as a character in one), a treatise

on logic, a police-detective's report, and Debrett's Peerage. Moreover,

the map of Newman's perigrinations resembles an intertextual tour guide

covering many centuries of English literature:

He watched the deer in Windsor Forest and admired the Thames
from Richmond Hill; he ate whitebait and brown-bread and
butter at Greenwich, and strolled in the grassy shadow of
the cathedral of Canterbury. He also visited the Tower of
London and Madame Tussaud's exhibition. One day he thought
he would go to Sheffield, and then, thinking again, he gave
it up. Why should he go to Sheffield? (p. 295)

Newman's route implicates Pope, in the reference to Windsor Forest,

Thomson, in the reference to Richmond Hill, Dryden, in the reference to

Greenwich, Chaucer, in the reference to Canterbury, and Shakespeare, in

the reference to the Tower of London. But why does Newman make such a

trip when he confesses to reading nothing but an occasional newspaper?

These "allusions" are intertexts remarking the novel as written, created

from a mosaic of preceding textual citations.

Other intertexts in The American function self-referential ly as

mises en abyme, representations or quotations of the text within the

text itself. J. Hillis Miller explains that mise en abyme, a term

borrowed from heraldry, is "a shield which has in its center (abyme) a

91
smaller image of the same shield, and so, by implication, ad infinitum,
with ever smaller and smaller shields receding toward the central
point."'7 Such sequences, repeated phrases, and sentence structures
are also mises en abyme as are the lines of successive literary influ-
ence and misinterpretation.'" For an item to qualify as a mise en
abyme, it must fulfill several requirements: "it must first have
points of analogy with the text as a whole, and, secondly it must,
ontologically speaking, be embedded (emboite) in the spatio-temporal
world of the text, existing both as an object within it and as a repre-
sentation or mirror of it."

Three different sorts of narrative intertexts, a painting, an
opera, and a fairy tale, all serve as a mise en abyme: "the structural
revolt of a fragment of narrative against the overall narrative which
contains it." This revolt leads to self-revelation. As Jean Ricardou
notes, "As soon as the narrative contests itself, it immediately
presents itself as narrative."^0 And, in presenting itself as narra-
tive, in affirming artifice, "realistic" presence falls away, and gaps
and holes are revealed. Such a mise en abyme occurs in the presentation
of Paul Veronese's depiction of the marriage feast at Cana, which opens
Chapter Two.

In the left-hand corner of the picture is a young woman
with yellow tresses confined in a golden head-dress; she
is bending forward and listening, with the smile of a
charming woman at a dinner-party, to her neighbour.
Newman detected her in the crowd, admired her, and
perceived that she too had her votice copyist — a young
man with his hair standing on end. (p. 26)

The scene of Newman's studying the canvas foreshadows coming textual

events. "The recognition of a beautiful woman, the votive attention,

92
the marriage, the splendid banquet, wifely charm at a dinner party, the
wife as an object of the collector's mania — all of these take on full
form as the plot unfolds," James W. Tuttleton explains.

This type of mise en abyme is also called internal intertextuality,

22
the reference by a text to its own activity. The implications for

meaning are the same, despite the terminology: meaning is abyssed in
the abyme, folded into the text and thus deferred in internal inter-
textuality. A similar textual fold reveals a blank space in the scene
at the opera. Several critics have commented on James's selection of
Mozart's Don Giovanni as the program at which Valentin is challenged to
the duel that eventually proves fatal. James W. Tuttleton remarks:

The conversations among the principals about the opera sets
up a series of parallels among the characters of the opera
and of the novel, in which, above all, Newman is the Don
Juan whose pursuit of Claire as Donna Elvira will be
obstructed by Urbain as the man of stone, with the ironic
reversal that Newman will be the one forsaken, not Donna
Elvira. 23

The irony that Tuttleton notes results from intertextuality, for we must
read the scene between Newman and Valentin through the filter of Don
Giovanni .

Similarly, intertextuality opens up an abyme in the text of Newman's
romance with Madame de Cintre, in turn suggesting the ultimate deferral
of their relationship. Madame de Cintre narrates the story of the beau-
tiful Florabella who, after starving for six months, is taken by her
lover to the Land of the Pink Sky to eat plum cakes. Madame de Cintre
insists on the intertextuality of the story when she tells Newman "I
could never have gone through the sufferings of the beautiful Florabella"

93
(p. 138), and some critics have further insisted on the mise en abyme
quality of the embedded narrative by identifying the Land of the Pink
Sky as Newman's California.

In addition to remarking the text as artifice and to offering mises
en abyme, the intertextual field in The American also presents models or
metaphors of text in the images of a statuette, a fan, and a chant. The
first, "a grotesque little statuette in ivory, of the sixteenth century
... a gaunt, ascetic-looking monk, in a tattered gown and cowl,
kneeling with clasped hands and pulling a portentously long face," serves
as Newman's response to the Reverend Mr. Babcock's letter accusing him
of hedonism. "It was a wonderfully delicate piece of carving, and in a
moment, through one of the rents of his gown, you espied a fat capon
hung round the monk's waist" (p. 73). Tuttleton notes that James
"intends us to see a latent meaning in this gift" because of the question
posed immediately following: "In Newman's intention what did the
figure symbolise? Did it mean that he was going to try to be as 'high-
toned' as the monk looked at first, but that he feared he should succeed
no better than the friar, on a closer inspection, proved to have done?1"1^
This textual moment verifies Barthes' contention that what interests us
the most is the space where the folds separate. He asks in The Pleasure
of the Text: "Is not the most erotic portion of a body where the
garment gapes?" In presenting the statuette with the all-important
opening which, in revealing the capon, subverts convention, the text
offers a model of itself, of its own subverting realism and originality.
A mise en abyme is thus created, and meaning is deferred into the gap
opened simultaneoulsy by the gaping garment and by the two questions

94
"What did the figure symbolize?" and "Was he going to be as 'high-toned
as the monk looked at first?". As a model of textual ity, the statuette
insists that the gaps are there and urges the reader toward reading
the text as a voyeur.

Another objet d'art in the story with a similar facility for open-
ing and closing serves as another textual model. This second example,
the fan Madame de Bell egarde opens in the scene where Newman suggests
throwing an engagement party, depicts "a fete champetre — a lady with a
guitar, singing, and a group of dancers round a garlanded Hermes" (p.
171). After examining her fan, Madame Bellegarde decides against allow-
ing Newman to pre-empt her opportunity to be the first party-giver. The
fan, of course, has offered Newman's scenario, a fiction within a
fiction, a potentiality the family matriarch would like to avert. She
reads the text of the fan as a narrative of joyous celebration in which
the singing lady with the guitar is Madame de Cintre, the dancers are
the guests, and Hermes, the god of science and commerce and the patron
of travelers — the center of attention--is Newman himself. As a vehicle
remarking the text within the text, the fan offers a mise en abyme.
Moreover, as a fan, it serves as a device to insist upon the textual ity
of both and so the deferment to which they are subject. Derrida's
commentary on the movement of the fan in the Mallarmean text is apropos
here:

it is also to remark that the fan re-marks itself: no
doubt it designates the empirical object one thinks one
knows under that name, but then, through a tropic twist
(analogy, metaphor, metonymy), it turns toward all the
semic units that have been identified (wing, fold, plume,
page, rustling, flight, dancer, veil, etc., each one
finding itself folding and unfolding, opening/closing

with the movement of a fan, etc.); it opens and closes
each one, but it also inscribes above and beyond that
movement the very movement and structure of the fan-as-
text, the deployment and retraction of all its valences;
the spacing, fold, and hymen between all these meaning-
effects, with writing setting them up in relations of
difference and resemblance. 26

With the folding and unfolding of the fan, what becomes of Newman's

future, including Madame de Cintre's taking of "the veil" is inscribed,

and the scene on the fan is forever deferred. Like the rent in the

monk's gown, then, the fan reveals a subversive text.

The "strange, lugubrious" chanting of the Carmelite nuns at their
cloister offers itself as the third textual metaphor in The American.
"It begain softly, but it presently grew louder, and as it increased it
became more of a wail and a dirge" (p. 277). As an intertext, it, like
the painting, objets d'art, and operas, presents further embedded
narratives leading in different directions into the maze. For the chant
becomes another text constructed entirely of the intertexts provided
by each nun's life-text: "It was their dirge over their buried affec-
tions and over the vanity of earthly desires" (p. 277). Again, like
the fan, the chant becomes a model: in folding back on itself again and
again the repetitive dirge mimics the repetitive weave of narrative.
Though the gaps be inaudible, like the space in the textual fabric—the
folds in the fan and the rent in the robe--they are nonetheless there,
for each nun must take the time to inhale so that she may defer the end
of the chant. "The chant kept on, mechanical and monotonous, with dismal
repetitions and despairing cadences" (p. 277).

All of the intertextual references, from painting and music, from
literature, both English and Continental, myth and modern, from maxims,

96
even from embedded fictions never bound separately, such as the story of
Madame de Cintre's first marriage and the tale of Mrs. Bread's youth,
add layer after layer to the narrative. Thus supplemented into exis-
tence, The American presents a complex intertextual surface, which
appears to offer a fully present reality and so meaning; however, each
of these intertextual references reveals a space, a gap, a silence,
which subverts the "reality" of the narrative. The text gapes, like the
role of the monk, to reveal as its capon, a space where presence and so
meaning were assumed to be fixed. Riddled with holes, the surface of
the text cannot maintain meaning. Significance seeps away into the
sedimented layers and is deferred into the abyss.

One last category of intertexts, the embedded historical fictions
permeating the fabric of the novel, points to the lesson of its inter-
textual ity: that the assembled texts forming The American create a
surface which is supplementary, a presence which can be deconstructed.
Derrida asks: "How does one generate this illusion? How is presence
attained without really attaining it? We approach here the strange
logic of the supplement." He goes on to explain that a supplement is a

surplus, "a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullestmeasure

27
of presence." Simultaneously, however, the supplement supplements.

"It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-

place-of ; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void." Josue Harari

recapitulates: "the supplement is added to make up for a deficiency,

but as such it reveals a lack, for since it is in excess, the supplement

can never be adequate to the lack."29

97
Each of the historical fictions cited in The American is supplemen-
tary and ends by revealing the abyss over which it is woven. For
example, on one of his sentimental journeys (itself an intertextual
situation), Newman stands before the beautiful Gothic tower of the Hotel
de Ville in Brussels. "He stood for half an hour in the crowded square
before this edifice . . . listening to a toothless old cicerone mumble
in broken English the touching history of Counts Egmont and Horn; and he
wrote the names of these gentlemen--for reasons best known to himself —
on the back of an old letter" (p. 66). We never discover or even pause
to speculate on the reason for Newman's notation, yet we should note that
he retextualizes the text of the Counts on another text, the letter,
within the text of The American. In such a manner, this historical
intertext presents a mise en abyme that reveals a void. An entire
chapter of French history is presented as a void when Newman calls on
Madame D'Outreville. She narrates a fiction involving her mother's snub
of Napoleon, and "it occurred to Newman that her evasion of a chapter of
French history more interesting to himself might possibly be the result
of an extreme consideration for his feelings" (p. 290). In any case,
the chapter is never approached and the silence of the gap announces
itself.

Perhaps the most curious historical intertext is Urbain de
Bellegarde's account of a different chapter of national history. We
learn that "He is writing a history of the Princesses of France who
never married" (p. 102). He writes, then, about barrenness, non-produc-
ing voids, in-life supplements to death, who, rather than reproduce and
generate life, "meaning," serve only to rename the abyss, the symbol of

the deferment of meaning. Claire, the fairy princess, of course,

becomes, as a nun, another of those supplements to death, cloistered

away in the Rue d'Enfer, which suggests the most famous of literary

abysses. Further reinforcing the absence suggested by the void is the

fact that no one knows where Urbain is during the early morning.

Valentin remarks: "I don't remember ever in my life to have seen him

before noon--before breakfast. No one ever saw him. We don't know how

he is then. Perhaps he's different. Who knows? Posterity, perhaps,

will know. That's the time he works, in his cabinet, at the history of

the Princesses" (p. 229).

Not only his text, but also the American himself, Christopher

Newman, is an already-written. James's opening picture of him, in fact,

relies on stereotype:

His usual attitude and carriage were of a rather relaxed
and lounging kind, but when, under a special inspiration,
he straightened himself, he looked like a grenadier on
parade. ... He had a very well-formed head, with a
shapely, symmetrical balance of the frontal and the occip-
ital development, and a good deal of straight, rather
dry brown hair. His complexion was brown, and his nose
had a bold, well-marked arch. His eye was of a clear,
cold gray, and, save for a rather abundant moustache, he
was clean-shaved. He had the flat jaw and sinewy neck
which are frequent in the American type. (p. 18)

Having presented his hero as a "typical American," James them attempts

to add details, which Charles Anderson thinks give Newman "individuality

Of]

and make him credibly human" •. "Frigid and yet friendly, frank yet
cautious, shrewd yet credulous, positive yet sceptical, confident yet
shy" (pp. 18-19). Plugged into the already-written rhetorical formula
of antithesis, however, these qualities are removed from the "ambiguous"
into the realm of the intertextual . When Mrs. Tristram calls Newman

99
the "great Western Barbarian," thereby investing him with more already-
written characteristics, Newman is further textual i zed and distanced
from mimetic reality and from originality.

Charles Anderson demonstrates that James's portrait of Newman
derives from some real as well as mythic sources: for example, Nathanial
Hawthorne's provinciality in aesthetic matters may have provided the
suggestion for Newman's preference for copies rather than the cracked,
old originals of masterpieces. James Russell Lowell, of whom James
wrote, "inveterately, in England or on the Continent, the American
abroad," and William Dean Howell s, who had "an intense national con-
sciousness," (not to mention Christopher Columbus, the type of adven-
turer) also helped rewrite Christopher Newman. Anderson concludes his
discussion of Newman's evolution by insisting on his textuality: "Such
an account of the hero's diverse origins may seem to present him as a
thing of shreds and patches. But to the extent that he is a typical
American he has to be a composite figure, since the 'type' never exists
in any single individual." Newman, like The American, is unoriginal,
supplemented by layers into presence. His taste for copies, rather

than Old Masters, itself, as Anderson points out, an already-written

32
convention by 1877, seals Newman's unoriginal character.

In The American, both text and character, then, we discover an

unoriginal bricolage, a mosaic of citation from a variety of other texts,

like the tall story Newman has learned to tell with Western humorists,

produced by "the trick of piling up consistent wonders" (p. 97). The

mosaic, the assemblage, speaks itself as such not only by referring to

itself as text through intertextual strategies but also by insisting

100

throughout upon various other sorts of assemblages. The Louvre, for

example, the setting of Newman's opening encounter with Noemie, is a

grand assemblage of art works, and Newman, himself as we have seem is

an intertextual entity as suggested by his name and the emphasis on his

character as a type. Madame de Cintre is described as a "compendium of

all the virtues" (p. 117), and her fate is the Carmelite convent. The

word "convent," of course, derives from the same root as "convene," and

in one of its meanings denotes an assemblage. A few critics have noted

the novel's assembled nature, but cite it as evidence of James's

immaturity as a writer. After explicating several of James's intertexts,

James W. Tuttleton writes:

I point to this whole assemblage of materials as really
another signal instance of James's attempt to transform
the sow's ear of sentimental romanticism into the silk
purse of the "new realism." But the effort is not wholly
successful, and James was surely right in remarking that
the book has a hole in it almost large enough to sink
into. 33

On the contrary, the assemblage is no attempt at transformation: assem-
blages are not endowed with such powers. They can only remark their
assembled character and provide a supplement, which, by its very nature,
points to the inevitable holes in every fiction. They provide a textual
surface over an unsoundable, silent depth.

Assembled surfaces disguising or hiding various sorts of abysses
are woven into the texture of The American. The novel, is in fact,
replete with passages discussing architectural assemblages: houses,
apartments, churches, as well as texts, as we have already seen. Each
of these descriptions presents only surface, as does the assembled text
as a whole. For example, in an early part cf the novel, Newman compares

101
the faces of the houses in the Faubourg St. Germain to the blank walls
of Eastern seraglios. "Newman thought it a queer way for rich people
to live; his idea of grandeur was a splendid facade, diffusing its
brilliancy outward too, irradiating outward" (p. 50). His interest,
we note, is in the facade, the assembled surface, which, by definition,
suggests artificiality or subversion. Such a concern is intensely
textual. Having gained entrance to the Bellegardes' home in the
Faubourg, Newman is offered a guided tour of the structure. When Newman
declines, Valentin shakes his head: "Ah, you have defeated a great
scheme, sir!" "'A scheme? I don't understand,' said Newman" (p. 84).
Although Valentin vows to explain at a later date, he never does.
"Scheme" is a revealing term to use since it points to depths, specif-
ically to textual deep-structure, the underlying assemblage supporting
the surface. Scheme can be defined variously as an outline, a draft
of a projected literary work, a plan for the method of a work, or a
complex unity in which the component elements cooperate and interact
according to a plan. In this scene between Newman and Valentin, then,
the American, the representative of the assembled scheme, is shown to
operate, ironically enough, solely on the surface level.

Newman's apartment is a text, too, supplemented lavishly to call
attention to its surface texture. "It was situated on the Boulevard
Haussmann, on a first-floor, and consisted of a series of rooms, gilded
from floor to ceiling a foot thick, draped in various light shades of
satin, and chiefly furnished with mirrors and clocks" (p. 78). He
himself is said to have "built an edifice" (p. 91). Edifice can be

102

defined as a fabric, a structure, further reinforcing the surface, the

constructed, even woven quality of text.

Valentin's apartment, perhaps even more textual, is furnished in a

similarly extravagant fashion:

his walls were covered with rusty arms and ancient panels
and platters, his doorways draped in faded tapestries, his
floors muffled in the skins of beasts. Here and there was
one of those uncomfortable tributes to elegance in which the
upholsterer's art, in France, is so prolific; a curtained
recess with a sheet of looking-glass in which, among the
shadows, you could see nothing; a divan on which, for its
festoons and furbelows, you could not sit: a fireplace
draped, flounced, and frilled to the complete exclusion of
fire. The young man's possessions were in picturesque
disorder, and his apartment was pervaded by the odour of
cigars, mingled with perfumes more inscrutable. Newman
thought it a damp, gloomy place to live in, and was
puzzled by the obstructive and fragmentary character of
the furniture, (p. 96)

All the furnishings, the intertexts, if you will, which assembled, define

the apartment are so supplemented as to be useless: one may neither sit

on the sofa nor light a fire on the hearth. They self-reflexively insist

upon their own purposelessness and lack of fundamental meaning. The

emphasis in the furnishings is on surface, on prolific, elegant

upholstery.

Such decor disturbs simple Mrs. Bread, and when Newman suggests that

she choose any room in the apartment for her own, she replies: "A room,

sir? They are all too fine for a dingy old body like me. There isn't

one that hasn't a bit of gilding." Newman answers in a way that affirms

the textuality of the rooms, the novel, and their deconstructability:

"It's only tinsel, Mrs. Bread. ... If you stay there a while it will

all peel off of itself." Mrs. Bread responds appropriately: "Oh, sir,

there are things enough peeling off already!" (p. 273).

103
Throughout the text returns to comment on the constructed, assembled
nature of its surface structure. Not only Newman but also Fleurieres
and the Carmelite convents are called "edifices," calling into play the
root meaning of the word, edifice as fabrication. The text also insists
upon the newest of Newman's hobbies, architecture: the art or science
of building or constructing edifices, fabrications— texts. He tells
Valentin that he has toured 470 churches and wonders if that indicates
sufficient interest in the topic. Even Claire de Cintre's name, cintre
meaning "arch," especially in a dark, romanesque church, suggests
construction visible at the surface while hinting at the labyrinth
within. We recall that in the Preface James comments that in The
American he was plotting "arch-romance," a term which suggests archi-
tectural as well as high romance. In these ways the subject of archi-
tecture becomes the architexture of The American, presenting a supple-
mented surface yet revealing an underlying absence.

A particular decorative and textual feature present in both
Newman's and Valentin's apartments provides a passage into the depths of
the abyss over which edifice and text are constructed. Both gentlemen's
residences are furnished with mirrors. In Newman's apartment they
serve as one of the chief furnishings; in Valentin's a mirror appears
among the shadows in a curtained recess. A Derridean intertext "WriTing,
EncAsIng, ScreeNing," in Dissemination makes itself available here to
explain the phenomenon of the mirror, an opening into the text that
goes unnoticed as opening. The mirror is a "diaphanous element guaran-
teeing the transparency of the passageway to whatever presents itself."^4

104
It is a two-way mirror reflecting the text as text and also transforming
what it permits to show through; however, it neither reflects nor trans-
mits perfectly. As a mirror, it is subversive, distorting reality by
representing it in reverse. The mirror is an operational paradox, the
"original" surface, which also contains the depths: "Everything
'begins,' then, with citation, in the creases [faux pi is] of a certain
veil, a certain mirrorlike screen. "*" "The screen," Derrida continues,
"without which there would be no writing, is also a device described j_n
writing. The writing process is reflected in what is written."

Indeed, in The American mirrors provide points of entry into the
textual labyrinth by suggesting the void underlying the supplement, by
implying in its reflective property the infinite deferral of citation.
In the sheet of looking glass in Valentin's rooms, for example, one is
unable to see anything, the text tells us except, we suppose, its own
tain. Even if it did reflect, it would represent the supplementary
texts of tapestry, drapery, upholstery. Likewise, when Valentin criti-
cizes his sister-in-law's gown saying, "You might as well wear a
standing ruff as such a dress as that," she turns to the mirror for
verification: "The mirror descended low, and yet it reflected nothing
but a large unclad flesh surface" (p. 121). Since flesh is the surface
of the text of the body, by reflecting nothing but a flesh surface the
mirror doubly insists upon its own surface. At other moments, however,
mirrors in The American act as the "screen without which there would be
no writing ... a device described j_n writing." The description of
Fleurieres is presented, for example, in a mirror image which, the text

105

insists, has been written, not only in Newman's guide-book of the

province but also in the conventions of the romance, more specifically

the gothic romance. We note its prominent position in the landscape,

and its deep-set windows, features reminiscent of, for example, the

opening to Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".

It presented to the wide paved area which preceded it,
and which was edged with shabby farm-buildings, an
immense faqade of dark time-stained brick, flanked by
two low wings, each of which terminated in a little
Dutch-looking pavilion, capped with a fantastic roof.
Two towers rose behind, and behind the towers was a
mass of elms and beeches, now just faintly green.

But the great feature was a wide green river,
which washed the foundations of the chateau. The
building rose from an island in the circling stream,
so that this formed a perfect moat, spanned by a two-
arched bridge without a parapet. The dull brick walls,
which here and there made a grand straight sweep, the
ugly little cupolas of the wings, the deep-set windows,
the long steep pinnacles of mossy slate, all mirrored
themselves in the quiet water, (p. 237)

Providing another intertextual dimension is Newman's subsequent remark

comparing Fleurieres to a Chinese penitentiary.

Mirrors, both as physical feature and as self- reflexive attribute
of the text, introduce us to the disseminating, deforming nature of
textual ity. By repeatedly reflecting and transforming other surfaces,
other already-writtens, or as Derrida calls them "citations," mirrors
act as penetrable screens. Once we, like Alice, recognize the mirror
for what it is and walk through it, we begin to experience the play of
language that works to defer meaning.

Beyond the mirrors in The American lies a linguistic labyrinth in
which rhetoric and word games infinitely defer meaning by suggesting
intertexts, creating ambiguities, and otherwise subverting meaning.

106
For instance, in the introductory characterization of Newman, a descrip-
tion noted earlier, he is described in terms of antithesis: "Frigid
and yet friendly, frank yet cautious, shrews yet credulous, positive
yet sceptical, confident yet shy" (pp. 18-19). Madame de Cintre is
introduced by the identical rhetorical pattern: "In her whole person
there was something both youthful and subdued, slender and yet ample,
tranquil yet shy" (p. 85). Oxymorons appear (Madame de Cintre' s
utterances are called "soft roughnesses" [p. 82]) as well as paradoxes
(Newman tells Madame de Cintre that her freedom is "a dreary bondage"
[p. 113]).

Other sorts of word games appear as well, suggesting that language
has lost its ability to communicate, that e^ery word contains within
itself its own deconstructing opposite. For example, when Valentin
pays Newman a visit, he admires the decor:

Newman looked at him a moment, and then, "So it j_s yery ugly?" he
inquired.

"Ugly, my dear sir? It is magnificent."

"That is the same thing, I suppose," said Newman (p. 88).
Likewise, when Newman is trying to pump Valentin for information about
his sister, he asks, "Is she grave or gay?" Valentin replies, "She is
both; not alternately, for she is always the same. There is gravity in
her gaiety, and gaiety in her gravity" (p. 101). Ugly, magnificent,
gravity, gaiety, in the labyrinth one term slides into the other.

An obvious pun may elude readers unaccustomed to spotting such
linguistic slides. At an early point in the novel, Valentin confesses

107
to Newman his fear of obesity: "he was too short, as he said, to afford
a belly. He rode and fenced and practiced gymnastics with unremitting
zeal, and if you greeted him with a 'How well you are looking!" he
started and turned pale. In your well he read a grosser monosyllable"
(p. 80). Although "gross" in English suggests obesity, French speakers
may understand the "grosser" monosyllable as gros, French for "fat."
Another word game, however, reaches deeper into the plot of the
novel and the specific problems it raises. I can think of few other
words in which the adjective "frank" or the adverb "frankly" appears
more often than in The American. On a cursory flip through the novel I
count eighteen instances of the words. I do not doubt that one might
verify yet other uses of "frank" since the term and its cognates present
important critical issues. For example, even the most traditional
critic can read this novel as an early example of the international
novel, pitting the American Christopher Newman against the Bellegardes,
the French, the Franks. Thus, Noemie is indeed, in more than one
sense, a "frank coquette." Her greatest concern and that of the Belle-
gardes as well is the franc, the French medium of exchange. As part of
his suit for Madame de Cintre's hand, the American reports on his
financial status: "Newman expressed his income in a round number which
had the magnificent sound that large aggregations of dollars put on
when they are translated into francs" (p. 128). Listening in silence,
Madame de Bellegarde finally responds, "You are very frank," and truly,
for her and her family, Newman is the incarnation of the coin of the
realm.

108
In a different meaning, a frank is defined as an enclosure,
especially to feed hogs in. Although no swine populate the pages of
the novel, enclosures, fences, walls act as repeating image patterns.
Due in part to its walls, for example, Fleurieres resembles a Chinese
penitentiary, and the salient feature of the Carmelite convent, for
Newman, is "a high-shouldered blank wall all round it," a wall further
characterized as pale, dead, discoloured (p. 305). The Bellegardes'
home in the Faubourg St. Germain, we recall, is also distinguished by
its blank wall, making it look like a convent. In a fine example of a
word undermining its own meaning, frank also signifies freedom, as in
the expression "frank and free." In The American a major conflict is
that Madame de Cintre is not free to come and go beyond the walls of
her homes. And, at the end, instead of becoming franc et quitte, she
enters into another sort of captivity behind the convent walls.

Although Madame de Cintre is not able to be quite frank or open
with Newman due to her franked position, Newman can be described as
frank in many senses: free to come and go (as demonstrated by his
traveling the continents of Europe, Asia, and North America); liberal,
bounteous, generous, lavish with his money (as demonstrated by his
offer of a dowry to Noemie and by a promise of a home to Mrs. Bread),
ingenuous, open, sincere, with undisguised feelings and candid,
unreserved speech.

With an ellipsis of "language," "frank" also signifies a mixed
language: a lingua franca. M. Nioche, Newman's French tutor, speaks
such a language:

109

The language spoken by M. Nioche was a singular
compound, which I shrink from the attempt to reproduce
in its integrity. He had apparently once possessed a
certain knowledge of English, and his accent was oddly
tinged with the cockneyism of the British metropolis.
But his learning had grown rusty with disuse, and his
vocabulary was defective and capricious. He had
repaired it with large patches of French, with words
anglicised by a process of his own, and with native
idioms literally translated. The result, in the form
in which he in all humility presented it, would be
scarcely comprehensible to the reader, so that I have
ventured to trim and sift it. (p. 52)

Thus, throughout the novel, whenever M. Nioche's speech is written, we
are to understand that the reportage is inaccurate. Since what we read
then is a disseminated, "mirror" translation, meaning is subverted and
delayed beyond recovery. What we find in the text is merely a substi-
tute, a supplement. In the place of actual speech, we discover moments
of text when we ask "Who speaks?"^'

M. Nioche's and the text's use of frank, then, in all of its sub-
versive meanings, reintroduces the undecidability and ultimate delay
inherent in all language and thus in all texts. Linguistic difference,
in fact, thoroughly deconstructs The American, revealing it to be
another fabrication, another architecture, another facade constructed
over a silent void. The hole James feared at the heart of the text is
the text.

Roman Jakobson comments in "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation":
"For us, both as linguists and as ordinary word-users, the meaning of
any linguistic sign is its translation into some further, alternative

sign." When we move from translating intralinguistically to inter-
linguistically, meaning is further differentiated: "translation from
one language into another substitutes messages in one language not for

separate code-units but for entire messages in some other language.
Such a translation is a reported speech; the translator recodes and

transmits a message received from another source.' Translation, in
any form, thus involves disseminating movement away from the original
sign. A good translator, one who can minimize the omnipresent gaps
in all translational effort, needs both the ultimate skill in his
native tongue and knowledge of the foreign language (and the world).

Christopher Newman has neither. Although his commercial success
is tremendous, he quit school at age ten, never finding either time or
inclination to engage in intellectual pursuits until his trip to Europe.
Declaring himself unfond of books — he has never read a novel — and devoid
of the "small change of conversation," Newman is linguistically naive.
His lack of linguistic prowess equals his lack of linguistic practice.
Newspapers form his principal reading; thus, we are not surprised to
discover that he believes "words were acts and acts were steps in
life" (p. 281). Understanding so little about his own language, he
nonetheless projects and contracts to learn French from M. Nioche, whose
knowledge of English is, as we have seen, likewise sketchy.

Abysmal gaps and silences inherent in all translations, texts, and
linguistic constructs readily evidence themselves in Newman's use of
French. In the first pages of the text, for example, we read that a
single word, combien (how much), constitutes the entire strength of
Newman's French vocabulary. The following pages declare that the text
lies, for Newman correctly uses terms such as splendide, pas beaucoup,
comprenez, and bien sur. Newman, however, does not understand much more
of the Gallic tongue, for when Tom Tristram tells Newman that his age,

thirty-six, "C'est 1e bel age," and translates the phrase as "a man
shouldn't send away his plate till he has eaten his fill" (p. 28),
Newman wonders that the short expression can mean "all that." By the
end of Chapter Three, the text announces that Newman has begun to
learn French, but there is little evidence of any new knowledge, and
in Chapter Four, he naively asks for what we presume to be a literal
translation of an idiomatic expression: "The coffee is almighty hot"
in the 1879 edition and "The coffee's ripping hot" in the New York
revision. M. Nioche's translation is never offered, creating yet
another gap in the text. The narrative proceeds to announce a further
gap in our knowledge concerning Newman's French performance conceding
"I don't know how much French our friend learned; but, as he himself
said, if the attempt did him no good, it could at any rate do him no
harm" (p. 55). In fact, our only indication that Newman has learned
anything comes from Noemie Nioche, who has ulterior motives. She
compliments Newman with "You speak French to-day like a charm. My
father has done wonders" (p. 60), after Newman has proposed to provide
her dowry if she copies several paintings for him. Moreover, we are
assured a few pages later that indeed "She was playing a game" (p. 63).
Newman misses Valentin's word play on "grosser" when he complains about
his tendency toward being overweight, and Newman admits that since he
does not understand Valentin, neither his language nor his culture, he
"shall lose some very good jokes" (p. 109). He mistranslates "gad-
about" as a "very beautiful person" (p. 121), thus complimenting the
young Marquise de Bellegarde after her mother-in-law insults her, and
the text later insists on Newman's poor French and his inability to
communicate with Noemie (p. 133).

112
He is hardly qualified, then, to translate M. de Bellegarde's
death note for Mrs. Bread. In fact, we cannot certify the translation
the text offers since we know that "Newman's fierce curiosity forced
a meaning from the tremulous signs" (p. 268). The text does not offer
the original. Throughout the novel prefers copies: Newman admires
the copies in the Louvre more than the originals; Newman claims himself
to be unoriginal, a copy; and finally, when Newman presents the
Bellegardes with the incriminating evidence, it, too, is a copy.
Ultimately, of course, the text, naming intertexts and replicating
conventions, is itself a copy. Originals in The American are absent,
disseminated into the labyrinth. Little wonder, then, that the Belle-
gardes, with their linguistic savvy, are not menaced by Newman's
threats: they recognize that they really add up to nothing.

The threats end up, with the rest of the text, signaling the void
that underlines the multi layered supplements of the novel: the inter-
texts, the rhetoric, the architecture, the language. Gaps, both

graphic, as in the text's rendering of the oath d d, and thematic

(Newman's is "an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises
which it will be needless to introduce to the reader in detail" [p. 31]),
breach the text, subverting claims to unity. The text ends with inti-
mations of mortality and sounds of silence: Newman burns the incrimi-
nating evidence, and Sister Veronica, nee Claire de Bellegarde, is
cloistered in the Carmelite convent vowing silence.

Claire's destiny in the Rue d'Enfer only reiterates the fate of
originality and meaning in The American. Hidden among the thick folds
of the Carmelite sisters' garb, and in their new ecclesiastical names,

113

origins and originality are deferred. Claire's choice to begin a
religious quest insists on her need to search for lost origins.
Throughout, however, origins, when named, as intertexts, for example,
only cast the reader into the labyrinth, for one intertext leads to
another which leads to another until, very soon, the reader finds
himself chasing differential meaning into the abyss. Originality is
likewise deferred in the textual structure of the already-written.
Neither the novel, nor Newman, nor the text we read of the incrimi-
nating note written by Monsieur de Bellegarde on his deathbed is an
original. Everything in the text, as a result of the behavior of
language, is, like one of Noemie's efforts, a copy, a metaphor of the
infinitely deferred origin.

The text is The American, and the American is Christopher Newman,
clearly an intertextual construct: he is a man with a plot in his
head (p. 307), a linguistic construct within a linguistic construct.
His "personal texture was too loose to admit of stiffening" (p. 70),
and similarly his text, The American reveals holes in the weave. He is
not really a "new man": like his text, he is already-written. The only
"reality" they represent is that of textuality, which, as a result of
dissemination, affirms endless substitution. The deconstructive mecha-
nism thus in place, we can see how the text deconstructs itself. Such
deconstruction, however, does not destroy the text, for, as J. Hillis
Miller observes,

insofar as "deconstruction" names the use of rhetorical,
etymological, or figurative analysis to demystify the mys-
tification of literary and philosophical language, this
form of criticism is not outside but within. . . . Far from
reducing the text back to detached fragments, it inevitably
constructs again in a different form what it deconstructs. 41

114
In deconstructing the "original," "unified," and "realistic" surface of
The American, we have replaced it with a bricolage of many strata of
already-written, self-subverting language, all of which lead, inevitably
into the abyme.

Notes

Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (New York: P. F. Collier,
1911), I, 208.

2
T. S. Perry, "James's American," cited in Henry James, The

American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 391-92.

Anonymous, "The American Novel — With Samples," cited in Henry
James, The American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Norton, 1978),
p. 407.

See Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan,
1961), pp. 49-50, for a summary of the French critical reception to
The American.

^James W. Tuttleton, "Rereading The American: A Century Since,"
The Henry James Review, 1, No. 2 (1980), 141.

"Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and
Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 16.

Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 17.

"Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1975), p. 259.

Jacques Derrida, "Positions," Diacritics, 3, No. 1 (1973), p. 41.

Anonymous, "Current Literature," cited in Henry James, The
American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 394.

Anonymous, "Recent Fiction," cited in Henry James, The American,
ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 397.

12Cargill, pp. 46-52.

loGeorge Knox, "Romance and Fable in James's The American," Anglia,
83, No. 3 (1965), 308-322.

Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press,
1975), p. 3.

115

15
J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure, II,"

The Georgia Review, 30, No. 2 (1976), 334.

Henry James, The American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York:
Norton, 1978), p. 17. I have chosen the 1879 London Macmillan edition
of The American as my copy text following the practice of both Leon
Edel for the Signet Edition and James W. Tuttleton for the Norton Criti-
cal Edition. Parenthetical page references for all quotations from the
text follow the pagination of the Norton Critical Edition. My argument
is not damaged by using the New York Edition, however, since, if any-
thing, the revised edition is more textual. As Royal A. Gettmann,
"Henry James's Revision of The American," American Literature, 16, No. 4
(1945), 285, notes, in the revised edition descriptions are more figured
and the grammar more complex.

J. Hillis Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," The
Georgia Review, 30, No. 1 (1976), 11.

1 8
Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," 13.

1 g

Ann Jefferson, The Nouveau Roman and the Poetics of Fiction
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980), p. 195, citing Lucien
Dallenbach, Le recit speculaire: essai sur la mise en abyme (Paris:
Seuil, 1977), pp. 65-74.

20
Jefferson, p. 194, citing Jean Ricardou, Problems du nouveau roman

(Paris: Seuil, 1967), p. 182.

21
Tuttleton, "Rereading The American," 143.

Jean Ricardou, Pour une theorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil,
1971), p. 162.

23
Tuttleton, "Rereading The American," p. 146.

24.
Tuttleton, "Rereading The American," p. 144.

"Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 9.

Of.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 251.

27
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatn Chakravorty

Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), p. 144.

Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 145.

29Josue V. Harari, "Critical Factions/Critical Fictions," in Textual
Strategies, ed. Josue V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979) ,
p. 34.

116

Charles R. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James's
Novels (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1977), p. 50.

^"Anderson, p. 53.
"^Anderson, p. 46.

Tuttleton, Rereading The American, p. 152.
J^Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 313-314.
"-^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 316.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 318.

37Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1974), p. 41.

Roman Jakobson, "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation," in On
Translation, ed. Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1959), p. 232.

Jakobson, p. 233.

Bayard Quincy Morgan, "Bibliography," in On Translation, ed.

Reuben A. Brower (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), p. 273.

J. Hillis Miller, "The Critic as Host," in Deconstructs on and

Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), p. 251.

CHAPTER FOUR
HYMENEAL STRUCTURE IN THE SPOILS OF POYNTON

ALEX: You've missed the point completely, Julia:
There were no tigers. That was the point.

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party, I.i.'
About the only issue on which critics of The Spoils of Poynton can
agree is that the novel employs the dramatic analogy: James had con-
firmed his intent to imitate scenic form in several detailed notebook
entries. From there, however, consensus disappears. Where Ford Madox
Ford finds "the technical high water mark of all James's work," Laurence
B. Holland discovers a "form . . . too slight to support the full
weight of substance and import which it seeks to accommodate.'"1 Fleda
Vetch's moral integrity, impugned by some, is championed by others.
Critics have even disputed James's donnee by arguing over whether
Poynton is actually a magnificent showplace. But the question that
Alan H. Roper notes "bids fair to be considered the novel's chief crux,"
the question that has occasioned some of the most diverse interpreta-
tion, is "Why does Ponyton burn?" As we would expect, the explanation
for the final fire reflects the thematic concerns of each critic. For
example, Bradford Booth, in "Henry James and the Economic Motif,"
reasons that the conflagration demonstrates the folly of materialism,
and Carren 0. Kaston, who sees Fleda as a character of Emersonian
consciousness, understands the destruction of Poynton as "both

117

118

consequence and symbol of Fleda's absence from herself. "° All these

critics read the novel as a social fable complete with concluding moral

because, at bottom, they assume contingent relationships between

signifier and signified and between literature and reality. Mark

Krupnick offers a Barthesian corrective to such thinking:

We tend to take for granted that a work of fiction
has its being in what it says. But what if what it says,
the words it uses, exists only to outline a space, a
void, as in Japanese painting? What if the words only
circle about an unstated and unnameable core of blankness,
and that blankness — rather than the words--is the point.
I say "the point" rather than "the meaning" because in
such an art we dare not speak about "meaning," there
being no kernel of content at the heart of it. The text
is like an onion: there is no secret at the center unless
we want to regard that absence or emptiness as the text's
secret.

If we agree to abandon our search for ultimate "meaning," thus relin-
quishing our hold on that central presence, we free ourselves to read
The Spoils of Poynton as discourse that deconstructs to reveal an
absence. Quite literally, in fact, the presence of Poynton self-de(con)-
structs, leaving only the text, "the poetry, as it were, of something

sensibly gone.'

The integrated texture of The Spoils of Poynton quickly begins to
unravel once we acknowledge the novel to be an intertextual construct,
or, to use Levi-Strauss' term, a bricolage, rather than an autonomous
work. James the father/author recedes into the critical background
throwing James the builder into relief. For years critics have investi-
gated those intertexts that are part and parcel of the novel, calling
them sources or analogues: Dumas 's play La Dame Aux Camel i as,
Maupassant's short story "En Famille," Balzac's novel Le Cure de Tours,

119

g
and Ibsen's drama The Master Builder. Other textual references within

The Spoils itself, for example to Don Quixote (Mrs. Gereth's "handsome
high-nosed excited face might have been that of Don Quixote tilting at
a windmill," [p. 31]) and to popular novels "about gentlemen who on the
eve of marriage, winding up the past, had surrendered themselves for the
occasion to the influence of a former tie" (p. 66), further deconstruct
the integrity of the text, labelling it as already-written.

Some of the most provocative intertexts, however, are James's own:
his choice of the Alvin Langdon Coburn photograph that appears as the
frontispiece to the New York Edition of The Spoils of Poynton, his
Preface to that edition, and his elaborate notebook entries. Together
they suggest deconstructive threads, which, when pulled, run the length
of the novel. The Coburn photograph appears on the first verso page of
the New York Edition. A caption, "Some of the Spoils," appears near
the bottom of a thin, transparent piece of onionskin on the recto page,
which separates the illustration from the title page. This light
membrane is only one of many hymeneal devices to appear in the novel.
The hymen is a figure of potential penetration and articulation desig-
nating "both the virginal intactness of the distinction between the
inside and the outside and the erasing of that distinction through
the commingling of self and other."10 An earlier manifestation of the
hymen appears in Coburn 's photograph, which depicts what we assume are
representative spoils arranged symmetrically around a fireplace: an
ironically appropriate scene, given the grand finale of the novel, a
fire touched off perhaps by "some rotten chimley." The largest object
in the sumptuous, textured scene ornamented by at least three other

120
texts, two paintings and a likewise highly ornamented and symbolic
Oriental fire screen, is a mirror, a type of hymen, which reflects the
back of the clock, a symbol, like the mirror, of Derridean differance:
difference and deferment. In the mirror we can also detect either
another painting or another mirror, in either case, more possibilities
for intertextuality within this intertext.

Where the photograph and the onionskin pose the question of the
hymen, a question to which the text returns again and again, the Preface
introduces further notions of doubling (already suggested in the photo-
graphy by the symmetry of the chairs, paintings, candelabra, and vases,
and by the reflective nature of the mirror), germination, and dissemina-
tion. Jacques Derrida notes that the preface can be thought of as a
simulacrum of a postface, which would "consist of feigning the final

revelation of the meaning or functioning of a given stretch of langu-

1 2
age." Producing such a simulacrum can be a laborious, unwelcome task.

More fruitful, Derrida suggests, is the attempt to play-act the

simulacrum:

while pretending to turn around and look backward, one
is also in fact starting over again, adding an extra
text, complicating the scene, opening up within the
labyrinth a supplementary digression, which is also a
false mirror that pushes the labyrinth's infinity back
forever in mimed--that is, endless—speculation. It
is the textual restance of an operation, which can be
neither opposed nor reduced to the so-called "principal"
body of a book, to the supposed referent of the post-
face, nor even to its own semantic tenor J 3

Like the mirror in Coburn's photograph, the preface is a mirror, which

immediately casts the reader into the labyrinth. The preface is also a

seed composed of language, which is, in turn, composed of terms, each

of which is a germ. Instead of inseminating, these terms/germs/seeds

disseminate and proliferate.

121

Derridean theory prepares us for what we discover in James's
Preface to The Spoils of Poynton. In that attending discourse James
describes the growth of his novels: "most of the stories straining to
shape under my hand have sprung from a single small seed, a seed as
minute and windblown as that casual hint for 'The Spoils of Poynton'

dropped unwittingly by my neighbour, a mere floating particle in the

1 5
stream of talk.' His terms/germs/seeds are not inseminated or pur-
posefully planted: the adjective "windblown" and "floating" imply,
rather, a disseminating process suggested by the neighbor's act of
dropping the hint "unwittingly." James continues, emphasizing the
disseminating nature of language:

Such is the interesting truth about the stray suggestion,
the wandering word, the vague echo, at touch of which the
novelist's imagination winces as at the prick of some
sharp point: its virtue is all in its needle-like quality,
the power to penetrate as finely as possible. The fineness
it is that communicates the virus of suggestion, anything
more than the minimum of which spoils the operation J 6

At once we are enmeshed in the web of the novel's structure and of
language and writing itself. For it is here, early in the Preface,
that we are introduced to the differential word-play about and around
which the novel is spun: the plays on "point" and "spoil." Suffice it
to say for the time being, that "point," a cognate of "Poynton," has
myriad meanings, including those cited by Jacques Lacan in his collec-
tion Points and by Derrida via Littre, who notes that pointure is an old
synonym of piqure, a printer's term for a small, pointed iron plate used
to fix the sheet to be printed on to the tympan. Spoiling denotes the
creation of an absence from a presence: the stripping or destruction of
goods by violence, a violence implied in the play of the word "point."

122
The notebooks elucidate what the Preface calls "that casual hint,"
making The Spoils of Poynton James's most thoroughly preplanned novel.
Beginning on December 14, 1893, James begins to consider "a small and
ugly matter": the tale of a young Scotsman who inherits, as a result of
his father's death, a large home and its valuable furnishings. When he
marries and thus takes exclusive control of the estate, he dispossesses
his mother, moving her to a small dower-house attached to the property.
She, however, refuses to give up her cherished things, and transports
them to the cottage. A public row ensues, and the mother's denouncement
of the son's legitimacy concludes the "rather sordid and fearfully ugly"
situation.10 James refines the plot, adding names and details in his
entries for 13 and 15 May, 11 August, 8 September, and 15 October 1895,
and for 13 and 19 February and 30 March 1896. Those later entries high-
light what we will see is the essential point — "point" signifying an
absolute void, as in the French negative form ne_ . . . point — rather
than meaning of The Spoils of Poynton. In the entry of May 13, 1895,
two of the several underlined words are "despoils" and "absence."'
The latter term appears again, in the February 13, 1896, entry, in
boldface, the method the editors of the notebooks have selected to indi-
cate either two, three, or four underlines in James's hand.

The entries also supply added justification for reading the novel
as disseminating discourse. First, James's discussion of the practice of
writing presents the writer more as the rereader and rewriter of other
discourse, in this instance from the disseminating germs of conversa-
tion, than as the father who creates by planting the seed. In the note-
books James refers to the growing text as "my little mosaic"; in the

123
Preface he reiterates the metaphor of piecing together the text. ' The
writer, James insists, "has to borrow his motive, which is certainly
half the battle; and this motive is his ground, his site and his founda-
tion. But after that he only lends and gives, only builds and piles

high."'1'1 What the writer does, in fact, is to begin at a false premise.
Since, as James admits in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, "relations
stop nowhere," to make of a disseminating germ a foundation is illogi-
cal. Because that germ or seed has no origin, the writer actually
pieces together his mosaic over a void. And, as The Spoils of Poynton
grows through the notebooks, from a short story of about 10,000 words to
a novel of nearly 70,000, we become increasingly aware of the novel's
"supplementary" composition and recall Derrida's strange logic of the
supplement:

The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a pleni-
tude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure
of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence.
It is thus that art, techne, image, representation,
convention, etc., come as supplements to nature and
are rich with this entire cumulating function. . . .

But the supplement supplements. It adds only to
replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-
place-of ; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void.
If it represents and makes an image, it is by the
anterior default of a presence. 23

The notebooks point in yet another way to a blankness at the heart

of The Spoils of Poynton. On their way from worksheet to novel, several

details and plot turns are lost. F. 0. Matthiessen and Kenneth B.

Murdock, the editors of James's notebooks, comment that "the number of

details which, listed in positive form, were finally treated negatively"

typifies James's style. In the notebooks, for example, Fleda writes to

Owen saying that she will meet him in London, while in the published

124
novel, no letter is written: Fleda meets Owen by chance. Whereas in
James's notes Fleda swears her love for Owen, in the final version she
only tacitly admits it. An original plan for a week of happiness
together at Ricks for Fleda and Mrs. Gereth is nowhere evidenced in the
novel, and though Fleda prematurely confesses to Mrs. Gereth Owen's
"secret" in the sketches, she waits until she no longer has any hope of
marrying him in the novel. Matthiessen and Murdock note: "Even the
device of the Morning Post is transformed into a negative. Mrs. Gereth
watches that paper from day to day to see whether the Brigstocks have
set the date for the marriage, but she is lulled into false security by
never finding any announcement there. "24

Together, James's three intertexts, the photograph, the Preface,
and the notebooks, suggest that much of the interest of The Spoils of
Poynton resides "in-between." In the photograph, the fireplace and the
mirror are situated in-between the twin sidechairs, and the mirror
between, in one dimension, the ornate frame and the cameo vases, and in
another, between the room and its reflection. The Preface names first
one center of the novel: "On the face of it the 'things' themselves
would form the very centre of such a crisis; these grouped objects, all
conscious of their eminence and their price, would enjoy, in any
picture of a conflict, the heroic importance."25 Later, he reiterates:
"The real centre, as I say, the citadel of the interest, with the fight
waged round it, would have been the felt beauty and value of the prize
of battle, the Things, always the splendid Things, placed in the middle
light. . . ." At the end of the same paragraph, however, he recants:

125

The spoils of Poynton were not directly articulate, and
though they might have, and constantly did have, wondrous
things to say, their message fostered about them a
certain hush of cheaper sound — as a consequence of which,
in fine, they would have been costly to keep up. In
this manner Fleda Vetch, maintainable at less expense —
though even she, I make out, less expert in spreading
chatter thin than the readers of romance mainly like
their heroines to-day — marked her place in my fore-
ground at one ingratiating stroke. She planted herself
centrally, and the stroke, as I call it, the demonstra-
tion after which she could n't be gainsaid, was the
simple act of letting it be seen she had character.

Taking James's final words as fact, most readers see Fleda Vetch as the

center of the novel. Michael Egan, however, reads The Spoils as a novel

with a "double centre, James's interest having moved from the conflict

over the spoils to the conflict in Fleda's mind.' A double center is
a definitional as well as a geometrical impossibility, however: the
fictional "center" of the novel lies at some disseminating point between
the two, within the text, actually at a non-center. Derrida's reading
of the structuring function of the center is helpful here in understand-
ing why Egan's assessment of the structure of the novel may be more
enlightened than others since, in locating the center in two subjects,
he really locates it nowhere. In the opening statement of "Structure,
Sign, and Play," Derrida explains:

. . . the structural ity of structure . . . has always
been neutralized or reduced, and this by a process of
giving it a center or referring it to a point of pre-
sence, a fixed origin. The function of this center
was . . . above all to make sure that the organizing
principle of the structure would limit what we might
call the play of the structure. By orienting and
organizing the coherence of the system, the center of
a structure permits the play of its elements inside the
total form. . . .

Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play
which it opens up and makes possible. ... it has
always been thought that the center, which is by

126

definition unique, constituted that very thing within
a structure which while governing the structure,
escapes structural ity. . . . The center is at the center
of the totality, and yet, since the center does not
belong to the totality . . . the totality has its
center elsewhere. . . . The concept of centered
structure is in fact the concept of a play . . .
[which is] constituted on the basis of a fundamental
immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself
is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this
certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is
invariably the result of a certain mode of being impli-
cated in the game. . . .29

To locate the center of The Spoils of Poynton and so full presence
either in Fleda or in the "things" arrests one kind of textual play
although it initiates another, taking its start from the center of tra-
ditional explication. Traditional readings, however, ignore the point
of the novel: that full presence is impossible and that absence is the
actual condition of all texts, both lived and read.

Even separately both Poynton and Fleda announce themselves as dis-
course, and in so doing, assert their intertextuality and deny their
own central structuring position. Poynton Park is plainly a literary
manor house constructed from conventions of other residences, such as
Penshurst, Mansfield Park, Wuthering Heights, and even the House of
Usher. It is difficult, in fact, to study English literary history
without tracing the path of the country house. As Richard Gill remarks
in Happy Rural Seat:

One thinks of Sidney at Penshurst or Pope in the gardens
at Cirencester, of Byron savoring the gloomy charm of
Newstead Abbey or Thackeray enjoying the hospitality of
Clevedon, the model for Castlewood in Henry Esmond. One
can imagine, too, the command performance of As You Like
It at Wilton or of Comus in the now roofless great hall
of Ludlow Castle. 30

127

Placing James within that tradition, Gill comments on what he calls

James's "abiding preoccupation with the English country house," citing

his use of the familiar emblem in letters, essays, and notebook

sketches, as well as in the fiction.3' Gill notes, for example, James's

assessment of the house in English Hours:

Of all the great things that the English have in-
vented and made part of the credit of the national
character, the most perfect, the most characteristic,
the only one they have mastered completely in all its
details, so that it becomes a compendious illustra-
tion of their social genius and their manners, is the
well-appointed, well -administered, well -filled country
house. 32

In James, Gill concludes, such houses function in self-subverting ways:
both as symbols of alienation and as symbols of communion, from James's
first use of the setting in his first published piece, "A Passionate
Pilgrim" (1878), to his last, A Sense of the Past (1917).

The house, then, is an intertextual component within the Jamesian
canon and each must be read through the filter of the others. Garden-
court, for example, the Touchett residence in The Portrait of a Lady,
and perhaps the most famous house in James, is described as a complete
world unto itself: "The large, low rooms, with brown ceilings and dusky
corners, the deep embrasures and curious casements, the quiet light on
dark, polished panels, the deep greenness outside, that seemed always
peeping in, the sense of well-ordered privacy in the centre of a 'pro-
perty.'"33 Haunting these rooms is a ghost, but when Isabel Archer
requests to see it, Ralph Touchett declines saying, "I might show it to
you, but you 'd never see it. The privilege is n't given to every one:
it 's not enviable."3^ Having been managed into a loveless marriage,
however, her ideas for a great career having vanished, Isabel finally

128

sees the ghost. Ralph had told her "that if she should live to suffer

enough she might some day see the ghost with which the old house was

duly provided."35

Furnishings from the world over insist that Poynton, too, is a

world complete:

It was all France and Italy with their ages composed to
rest. For England you looked out of old windows--it was
England that was the wide embrace. While outside, on
the low terraces, she contradicted gardeners and refined
on nature, Mrs. Gereth left her guest to finger fondly
the brasses that Louis Quinze might have thumbed, to sit
with Venetian velvets just held in a loving palm, to
hang over cases of enamels and pass and repass before
cabinets. There were not many pictures — the panels and
the stuffs were themselves the picture; and in all the
great wainscoted house there was not an inch of pasted
paper, (p. 22)

Among her valued possessions representing all the civilized world,

Mrs. Gereth also includes Oriental china and a remarkable Maltese cross,

Like Gardencourt, Poynton also contains ghosts, unimagined at the

beginning but realized at the end. In suggesting the existence of

several phantoms at Ricks, Fleda Vetch denies their previous existence

at Poynton:

"Somehow there were no ghosts at Poynton," Fleda went
on. "That was the only fault."

Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with
this fine humour. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."

"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly
echoed.

"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.

"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."

Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young
friend suggestive. "Only she won't see them."

"No, 'she' won't see them." (p. 250)

Each residence, then, houses, at least one ghost, a phenomenon
treated by Tzvetan Todorov in several essays, including "The Secret of

129

Narrative." In that essay Todorov proposes that "the Jamesian narrative

is always based on the quest for an absolute and absent cause. . . ."

On one hand there is an absence (of the cause, of the
essence, of the truth), but this absence determines
everything; on the one hand there is a presence (of the
quest), which is only the search for an absence. . . .
On one hand he deploys all his forces to attain the
hidden essence, to reveal the secret object; on the
other, he constantly postpones, protects the revelation—
until the story's end, if not beyond. The absence of
the cause or of the truth is present in the text —
indeed, it is the text's logical origin and reason for
being. The cause is what, by its absence, brings the text
into being. The essential is absent, the absence is
essential .36

The ghost becomes one manifestation of that absolute cause, and curiously
enough, is invariably treated as a presence. "The essence," comments
Todorov, "is never present except if it is a ghost, that is, absence par
excellence."37 A ghost, then, is the presence of absence.

Ghosts inevitably appear at Poynton since it represents a desire
for full presence: Mrs. Gereth's whole life is "but an effort toward
completeness and perfection" (p. 50), toward a full presence in the
things, thought by Mrs. Gereth to be "the sum of the world" (p. 24).
Poynton Park, however, and the things themselves, are textual and inter-
textual, their essence absence, and hence, the haunt of ghosts. When
that is realized, when the ghosts are recognized, nothing is left but
the denouement, the narrative stopping once the absence/presence is
attained: once Isabel sees the ghosts and once Poynton' s essence is
revealed as an essential absence. Thus, the burning of the Gereth's
house is a symbolic repetition of the already demonstrated void at
Poynton Park.

130
The ghosts inhabit the spaces opened in the fabric of the text not
only by the intertextuality of the novel The Spoils of Poynton but also
by the conspicuous textuality of both Poynton itself and its contents.
From the outset Poynton is presented as a textual entity, which has
been supplemented into existence by Mrs. Gereth's genius for collecting,
and Mrs. Gereth, in turn, is supplemented into presence by her things.
The text remarks: "The mind's eye could indeed see Mrs. Gereth only in
her thick, coloured air; it took all the light of her treasures to make
her concrete and distinct" (p. 146). Poynton is a "complete work of
art," "a provocation, an inspiration, the matchless canvas for a
picture" (p. 13). To call Poynton a canvas insists on its textual pro-
perties, for a canvas, like a text, is woven, a fabrication, a textile,
and as such bears a kinship to text, "text" and "textile" having the

same root.

Poynton self-reflexively speaks itself as text in other instances.
For example, early on we read: "Poynton was the record of a life. It
was written in great syllables of colour and form" (p. 22). Indeed,
Poynton records Poynton, itself another text, recording its own history.
Self-reflexively, too, the book comments on its own process, smack in
the middle of the discourse, creating a gap, a moment of text when we
ask, "Who speaks?" The fabric is run during a conversation in which
Mrs. Gereth tries to convince Fleda to go to stay at her father's: "We
have n't had much innocent pleasure since we met, have we?" she asks.
And then the textual moment: "But of course that would n't suit our
book" (p. 133).

131

Poynton's "record of a life" is a bricolaqe assembled by

Mrs. Gereth and her "genius for composition." Each treasure is a text

unto itself, a model of language, and as a supplement and through its

differential character, writes further fictions. Consider Fleda's

reaction to a Ricks refurbished with the spoils of Poynton and

Mrs. Gereth's response to Fleda's use of language:

. . . she [Fleda] only, from where she stood in the room,
called out, one after the other, as if she had had a list
before her, the items that in the great house had been
scattered and that now, if they had a fault, were too
much like a minuet danced on a hearth-rug. She knew them
each by every inch of their surface and every charm of
their character—knew them by the personal name their
distinctive sign or story had given them; and a second
time she felt how, against her intention, this uttered
knowledge struck her hostess as so much free approval, (p. 73)

Every objet d'art is a story, and in calling out the name of each, Fleda
writes, for Mrs. Gereth at least, another fiction. The supplementary
nature of the furnishings—their names and each's own fiction--is further
insisted upon when Fleda thinks how the text of a Poynton must appear
stripped of its supplements: "in the effort to focus the old combina-
tions she saw again nothing but gaps and scars, a vacancy that gathered
at moments into something worse" (p. 79).

One bibelot in particular acts as a structural homology by repeat-
ing the structure of both The Spoils of Poynton and Poynton's spoils.
The Maltese cross is, first of all, a fiction: it is not "maltese" at
all, and as Oscar Cargill notes, "It is important not to attach any of
the symbolism of charity, the chief virtue of the Knights of Malta, nor
of the beatitudes for which the eight points of the true Maltese Cross
are said to stand, to the cross in this story."39 The cross is, rather,

132
"a small but marvellous crucifix of ivory, a masterpiece of delicacy, of
expression and of the great Spanish period" (pp. 73-74). Mrs. Gereth
had heard of it in Malta, and had found it through what the text calls
"an odd and romantic chance" but what sounds like the process of reading
or, to be more specific, the formula of Barthes's hermeneutic code: "a
clue followed through mazes of secrecy till the treasure was at last
unearthed" (p. 74). In the end, however, the cross symbolizes an absence
of knowledge: "She [Fleda] said to herself that of what it would symbo-
lise she was content to know nothing more than just what her having it
would tell her" (p. 261). It also represents the absence of the con-
summation of Fleda and Owen's love, Owen offering the gift following
his long-delayed marriage to Mona Brigstock. Further, the \/ery shape
of the gift insists upon an absence of meaning. As Derrida reminds us,
the X (The chiasmus) — a model also of a crucifix — "can be considered a
quick thematic diagram of dissemination."^ And when the Maltese
cross, a term/germ/seed, gets disseminated into the text, it produces
not meaning, but an excess of meaning, which disguises an underlying
absence. Poynton, we recall, is "an impossible place for producing; no
art more active than a Buddhistic contemplation could lift its head
there" (p. 148). Waterbath, at least, bears Mona, repeatedly called
"a product of Waterbath." Finally, of course, at the end, the cross,
along with the other spoils, is rendered quite literally absent, burned
in the Poynton disaster.

The Spoils of Poynton is thus a drama of presence and absence:
its focus on textuality (a similar drama) suggests it, its imagery (the
ghosts, the Maltese cross, the other spoils) suggests it, the plot

133
(the packing and unpacking, the final fire) suggests it. The very
names of the property and of the text itself reveal their textual ity
and the absence underlying it. "Poyn" is, according to the OED, a
variant of the obscure verb "poin," meaning to prick or stitch. The
text of Poynton, like the Oriental fire screen in Coburn's frontispiece,
is pointed; that is, stitched through and through. Beneath the supple-
mentary stitching lies the canvas, that fabric which will unravel.
"Point" is, in fact, a term which undoes itself. While the verb
"point," as in "needlepoint" or "petitpoint," signifies the elaboration
of an ornamental design with stitching, the noun "point" as in "bringing
a discussion to a point," has to do with simplification. And indeed,
a point is defined as a "minute mark like a prick." In French too, the
term point is self-subverting: in the expression point d'ebull ition,
point marks the moment at which a phenomenon, such as boiling, is
achieved; however, the expression point mort denotes the neutral gear in
an automobile transmission, that position where nothing happens. ^ The
French point is also a mark of punctuation: a spatio-temporal config-
uration, a present absence, a full void, an end that also signals the
impending beginning of the next sentence. A point, then, can mean
something — a point in space or time, a small measure, a particular of
discourse — or nothing, as in the second element of the French adverbial
negation ne . . . point. The name Poynton appears in James's notebook
entry of August 4, 1892, near the end of a list of possible names. It
is interesting, given the French adverbial meaning of point, to specu-
late on the relationship of that name with a suggestion of February 22,
1981, for a place name, a name that never reappears in James's oeuvre:
Void.

134
The English "point" derives from the Latin punctum, that which is
pricked. In printing, a point is one of the short sharp pins fixed to
the tympan of a press so as to perforate the sheet and serve to make
register. A point is also a punctuation mark, especially the mark of
full juncture. In these ways, too, Poynton, by virtue of its name,
declares its own textual ity. Yet another definition of "point" further
illustrates the specific textual nature of The Spoils of Poynton.
Derrida begins his essay "Restitutions of Truth to Size" with the Littre
definition of pointure, noting, in addition to the OED definitions, the
use of the term by shoemakers and glovers to denote the number of
stitches [the size] of a shoe or a pair of gloves. The "point" of
shoes is, in fact, a minor issue in the novel: repeatedly Mona is said
to have big feet--her patent-leather shoes, appropriately sexual
footwear, are said to resemble a man's — while Fleda is said to have
small feet: Mrs. Gereth promises "If you're in want of money I've a
little I can give you. But I ask no questions—not a question as small
as your shoe!" (p. 133). Thus, in at least these two ways, as printers'
and cobblers' terms, "point" (and so Poynton) becomes a hymen, a textual
paradigm: like the press points separating the paper from the press,
like the shoe or glove separating the body from the world.

Critics who locate the "center" of the novel in Poynton Park, then,
are sadly missing the point by overlooking the disseminating nature of
the place and thus the prevailing absence. The other critics, those
in the majority who discover Fleda Vetch at the heart of the novel, are
similarly mistaken. As Frank Lentricchia notes in his reading of
Derrida: "the center, in so many words, is the creation of the

135
'force of desire.' In something like an ultimate act of wish-fulfill-
ment, desire attempts to establish the center beyond fictive status as
objective reality, the ground of all grounds. . . ."^ Desire itself
is, however, yet another supplement for the desired, a present substi-
tute that takes the place of an absence.

The Fleda-centered critics, in acting on their desire, find hers a
subject for dispute. Her small feet, feet since ancient times read as
a sexual part of the anatomy, might or might not indicate a sluggish
libido. More probably they are a manifestation of what we might call
the "Cinderella seme" for beauty. There is no arguing, however, that
she finds Owen Gereth sexually attractive:

In the country, heated with the chase and splashed with
the mire, he had always much reminded her of a pictur-
esque peasant in national costume. This costume . . .
was as copious as the wardrobe of an actor; but it never
failed of suggestions of the earth and the weather, the
hedges and ditches, the beasts and birds. There had been
days when he struck her as all potent nature in one pair
of boots. It did n't make him now another person that
he was delicately dressed, shining and splendid, that he
had a higher hat and light gloves with black seams, and
an umbrella as fine as a lance, but it made him, she
soon decided, really handsomer, and this in turn gave him —
for she never could think of him, or indeed of some other
things, without the aid of his vocabulary — a tremendous
pull. Yes, that was for the moment, as he looked at her,
the great fact of their situation—his pull was tremendous.
She tried to keep the acknowledgement of it from trembling
in her voice. ... (p. 150)

Fleda's desire is never consummated: thus, her "honor" is unspoiled.

Her maidenhead remains intact, pierced neither by Owen nor by one of his

"arms of aggression and castigation," among which are at least eighteen

rifles and forty whips, not to mention his pointed umbrella. Fleda, like

136

Poynton itself, is a structural hymen, and, as we read, as the text

deconstructs, we, like Mrs. Gereth, can think "of little but things

hymeneal" (p. 38).

To understand Fleda's function in The Spoils, we need to consider

Derrida's discussion of the hymen:

To repeat: the hymen, the confusion between the
present and the nonpresent, along with all the indif-
ferences it entails within the whole series of opposites
(perception/nonperception, memory/image, memory/ desire,
etc.) produces the effect of a medium (a medium as element
enveloping both terms at once; a medium located between
the two terms). It is an operation that both sows confu-
sion between opposites and stands between the opposites
"at once." What counts here is the between, the in-
between-ness of the hymen. The hymen "takes place" in
the "inter-," in the spacing between desire and fulfill-
ment, between perpetration and its recollection. But this
medium of the entre has nothing to do with a center. 46

The hymen is a folded structure, a woven (read textual) supplement,
wherein terms disseminate. As Derrida says: "Dissemination in the folds
of the hymen: that is the 'operation.' Its steps allow for (no)
method: no path leads around in a circle toward a first step, nor pro-
ceeds from the simple to the complex, nor leads from a beginning to an
end." Near the end of his long corrective to Mallarme criticism in
"The Double Session," Derrida begins to wind down his discussion of the
hymen by playing with words with which he has been punning throughout.

If--as a folded sail, candid canvas, or leaflet — the hymen
always opens up some volume of writing, then it always
implies and implicates the pen [plume]. With the range of
all its affinities (wing, bird, beak, spear, fan; the form
sharpened into an j_ of all the points: swan, dancer,
butterfly, etc.), the quill brings into play that which,
within the operation of the hymen, scratches or grafts the
writing surface--pl ies it, applies it, stitches it, pleats
it, duplicates it. 48

137
In The Spoils Fleda functions as a hymen, a text that takes place
between opposites, embroidering and unfolding, not meaning, but point.

On the level of plot, both Mrs. Gereth and Owen employ Fleda as a
go-between. Almost simultaneously Mrs. Gereth secures Fleda1 s promise
to help break up the romance between Owen and Mona, and Owen enlists
Fleda' s aid in convincing his mother to return the spoils to Poynton
Park. Beginning with Fleda's role as mediator between mother and son,
we can discover an ambassadorial motif in the novel, or, like Laurence
B. Holland, note a religious theme, with Fleda serving as savior.
Without thematizing, however, we can see that Fleda, by acting as the
go-between, literally fulfills a hymeneal function, convincing
Mrs. Gereth to return the treasures to Poynton and thus removing the
one obstacle to Owen's marriage to Mona.

On a more purely structural level, Fleda serves as a hymen between
masculine and feminine forces. Just as she mediates between Owen and
his mother, she also stands between structural opposites Poynton and
Waterbath and between Ricks and her father's house. Waterbath, the
opening setting of the novel, presents a conspicuously feminine resi-
dence, as well it might. The Brigstocks, as far as we know, are a
family of four women, three daughters and a mother: no mention is made
of any men. The "maddening relics of Waterbath" include "little brackets
and pink vases" and "family photographs and illuminated texts" (p. 19),
stereotypical women's trinkets. Moreover, Mrs. Brigstock declares her
bourgeois femaleness by reading magazines that, in catering to a female
audience, provide patterns for "grease-catchers," that is, for

138
antimacassars. Even the images evoked by the name "Waterbath"--"water,"
that elemental nurturing force, the original mother, and "bath" suggest-
ing the depth of the womb — further endow the place with feminine
characteristics.

Poynton, on the contrary, is a particularly masculine place,
constructed in the Jacobean style, decorated, in part, with Louis Quinze
furnishings. Mrs. Gereth, its chief resident, though a mother, is
described in masculine terms as Don Quixote and as "Atlas under his
globe" (p. 71). In her male role she fires the missile, the female
magazine, at the Brigstocks in a departing shot. The only detailed
glimpse we get of any room at Poynton is Owen's: "all tobacco-pots and
bootjacks" (p. 59), semes for masculinity. And, as the name Waterbath
suggests the female anatomy, Poynton suggests the male.

Richard Gill notes what he sees as the dialectical arrangement of

Waterbath and Poynton, thematizes the operation, and locates a synthesis

in Ricks:

The first contrast is a perfectly obvious one: Waterbath
in all its ugliness and pretentiousness against the
resplendent, authentic beauty of Poynton. And on this
level, the theme is also obvious enough: tasteless
materialism is found wanting by the genuinely superior
standards of cultivation it threatens to destroy. But
this almost elementary antithesis is complicated by the
introduction of Ricks, for the dower house also plays a
symbolic role in the moral scheme of the novel. Just as
Poynton by its yery existence stands as a rebuke to Water-
bath, so also does humble Ricks comprise elements needful
to the moral life but missing from both the other houses. ^0

One need not take pains to manufacture themes, however: as Derrida says,

"such dialectical happiness will never account for a text."5' Derrida

continues:

139

If there is thus no thematic unity or overall meaning
to reappropriate beyond the textual instances, no total
message located in some imaginary order, intentional ity,
or lived experience, then the text is no longer the
expression or representation (felicitous or otherwise)
of any truth that would come to diffract or assemble it-
self in the polysemy of literature. It is this herme-
neutic concept of polysemy that must be replaced by dissem-
ination. 52

This dissemination takes place, of course, within the folds of the

supplementary hymen, "that obscure object of desire," in the case of

The Spoils, within Fleda Vetch. Derrida comments: "'More' and 'less'

are only separated/united by the infinitesimal inconsistency, the next-

53
to-nothing of the hymen." In this text Fleda, as hymen, separates/

unites the outside, male Poynton with the inside, female Waterbath: as
a Jamesian reflector, a mirror, a type of hymen, she separates/unites
Owen, Poynton' s offspring, with his near-anagrammatical mate, Mona,
Waterbath' s product.

In a non-dialectical way, she similarly relates Ricks and her
father's house. Ricks, like Waterbath, is described as another Ur-womb.
The parlor is said to be "practically a shallow box" (p. 53), and "the
entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches" (p. 54),
the homes of those prodigiously reproductive animals. The most distinc-
tive ornaments at Ricks are, however, the twice-mentioned "four iron
pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums" (p. 53).
The pots repeat the womb image and act as an emblem for Ricks. Never
lived in by a male, the place is decidedly female, haunted by the poor
maiden aunt with the tender life story, who is fished out of an empty
barn, another womb figure.

140
Ten Raphael Road, West Kensington, Fleda's father's residence in
the "flat suburb," is furnished as a male refuge. Having married off
his daughter Maggie, Mr. Vetch no longer wishes to provide a home for
Fleda, so he keeps his hours and his home to suit himself only. Fleda,
compelled by Mrs. Gereth to return home for a time, finds herself alie-
nated from her old environs:

She had in their common sitting-room the company of the
objects he was fond of saying he had collected — objects,
shabby and battered, of a sort that appealed little to his
daughter: old brandy-flasks and matchboxes, old calendars
and hand-books, intermixed with an assortment of penwipers
and ash-trays, a harvest he had gathered in from penny
bazaars, (p. 145)

When the clutter is mentioned again, first the "penwipers and ash-trays"

(p. 146) and then the "brandy-flasks and penwipers" (p. 153) are singled

out. Although flask, wiper, and ashtray are all traditionally male

possessions, the common element in the two phrases, the penwipers,

becomes the emblem of Raphael Street as the iron pots represent Ricks.

And appropriately enough, since a penwiper implies a pen, a quill, a

point, all intensely masculine if not phallic images. Shuttling between

Ricks and Raphael Road as she does between Waterbath and Poynton, Fleda

is, again, the hymen taking place between the two.

As Fleda folds between Waterbath and Poynton and Ricks and Raphael

Road, she also presents a blank, another characteristic of the hymen.

In fact, time and time again the word "blank" appears in the text, often

in reference to Fleda. "Fleda tried to think of some of the things at

Poynton still unappropriated, but her memory was a blank about them"

(p. 79); "When the messenger informed them that Mr. Gereth was in the

drawing-room the blank ' Oh 1 ' emitted by Fleda was quite as precipitate

141
as the sound on her hostess's lips" (p. 82); "Fleda looked very blank"
(p. 130); "Fleda was too absorbed in her explanation to do anything but
take blankly the full cold breath of this" (p. 240). In yet another,
more literally textual way, Fleda's hymeneal blankness is demonstrated
by Mrs. Gereth's remark that Fleda will be "a bit of furniture," a
position Fleda finds she can "conscientiously accept" (p. 245). Note-
worthy here is a specialized definition of furniture. As Warren
Chappell defines it in A Short History of the Printed Word, "Blank areas
in a page or along margins are filled with blocks known as furniture. ""
Within the folds and blankness of Fleda, one may say (as Derrida notes
of the hymen) "the very textual ity of the text is remarked. "" The
blank of the hymen manifests itself in the margins, along the edge, or
as Derrida comments, at the edge of being:

At the edge of being, the medium of the hymen never becomes
a mere mediation or work of the negative; it outwits and
undoes all ontologies, all philosophemes, all manner of
dialectics. It outwits them and — as a cloth, a tissue, a
medium again — it envelops them, turns them over, and
inscribes them. 57

As hymen, Fleda functions as a text, whose chief characteristic is
another hymeneal /textual construct, her imagination. She is, in fact,
an artist, a painter, more precisely. Although we do not see her paint,
we do note her embroidering a piece for her sister's wedding gift.
Embroidery suggests, of course, a metaphor for textuality and the play
of the hymen since the backside of an embroidered cloth mimics the front
in a near mirror reflection. In a good piece of work, the fabric stand-
ing between the two sides appears not to have been pierced at all.
Fleda's imagination separates her from the rest of the characters in the

142
novel. As Mrs. Gereth comments: "you've a lovely imagination and
you're the nicest creature in the world. If you were inane, like most
girls — like every one in fact — I'd have insulted you, I'd have outraged
you, and then you'd have fled from me in terror" (p. 117). Owen and
Mona clearly have no imagination: Owen especially "has no art with his
pen." He comes by it or by the lack of it naturally, however, for his
mother "had no imagination about anybody's life save on the side she
bumped against" (p. 138).

As hymeneal text, Fleda's imagination envelops, turns, and
inscribes all manner of dialectics as specified by Derrida's descrip-
tion: "This imagination of Fleda's was a faculty that easily embraced
all the heights and depths and extremities of things" (p. 135). It
wanders freely, a point to which the text repeatedly returns. At the
beginning the text remarks "Fleda Vetch was dressed with an idea,
though perhaps not with much else" (p. 5). Her "only treasure" is her
"subtle mind." Throughout, Fleda's imagination situates her between
fiction and reality, absence and presence, folding her first one way
and then the other. For instance, once Fleda falls for Owen, her imag-
ination takes over:

She dodged and dreamed and fabled and trifled away the
time. Instead of inventing a remedy or a compromise,
instead of preparing a plan by which a scandal might be
averted, she gave herself, in her sacred solitude, up to
a mere fairy-tale, up to the very taste of the beautiful
peace she would have scattered on the air if only some-
thing might have been that could never have been. (pp. 44-45)

When she recognizes that Mrs. Gereth will move to Ricks, she is still

not satisfied that all will end peacefully and fantasizes an elaborate

fiction:

143

. . . Fleda had an imagination of a drama, of a "great
scene," a thing, somehow, of indignity and misery, of
wounds inflicted and received, in which indeed, though
Mrs. Gereth's presence, with movements and sounds,
loomed large to her, Owen remained inaistinct and on the
whole unaggressive. He would n't be there with a ciga-
rette in his teeth, very handsome and insolently quiet:
that was only the way he would be in a novel, across whose
interesting page some such figure, as she half-closed her
eyes, seemed to her to walk. Fleda harboured rather,
and indeed with shame, the confused, pitying vision of
Mrs. Gereth with her great scene left in a manner on her
hands, Mrs. Gereth missing her effect and having to appear
merely hot and injured and in the wrong, (p. 56)

Fleda later re-imagines Owen as a gentleman in a novel and initially
fantasizes the parlour maid as "an actress in the drama, . . . herself
. . . only a spectator" (p. 82), and herself as "one of those bad
women in a play" (p. 177), and again as the mistress of Poynton assign-
ing an abode there to Mrs. Gereth, "the great queen-mother" (p. 146).
Even in the scene preceding the final conflagration, Fleda imagines her
own return from Poynton that evening "with her trophy under her cloak"
(p. 261). In folding the text back and forth — in presenting Owen as a
character in a novel, which he is, and in presenting Fleda in her own
imagination as a character in a drama, when, in fact, she is just that--
Fleda's imagination performs invagination, to use Derrida's term,
repeatedly folding the outside of the text into the inside. As hymen,
she plays, as she describes in another context, "a double game" (p. 127)
in more ways than one.

The very name Fleda Vetch deconstructs the character's hymeneal
function in the novel. In the notebooks the girl of imagination is
first named Muriel Veetch, and some critics interpret the change to
Fleda Vetch as a simple concession to musicality. Alan H. Roper notes,

144

however, that Fleda is an obviously emblematic name:

"that its significance is double a little thought will
. . . make clear, for if it is suggestive of flight in
the sense of running away it can also be suggestive of
flight in the sense of aspiration. We need only compare
the past participle 'fled' with 'fleet'--particularly in
its old verbal sense of to fly. 58

Oscar Cargill works instead with the surname. "Vetch," he notes, is a
fodder vine used as a quick-growing cover on poor soil: "it is possible
that James thought that a rather barren soil had nourished Fleda 's sensi-
bility," he suggests. Curiously, though, not even Roper, who cites
connections between The Spoils and the Iliad, has noted that the last four
letters of Fleda form a familiar intertextual name, Leda. In Greek
myth, of course, Leda bore four children: Castor and Clytemnestra by
King Tyndareus of Sparta, and Pollux and Helen, the result of her rape
by Zeus, fabled to have come to her in the body of a swan. Leda was a
favorite subject of several of the most celebrated painters of the
Renaissance, including, incidentally, three of James's particular favo-
rites, Paul Veronese, Correggio, and Michelangelo. The myth of Leda's
rape insists upon the importance of the hymen for both that fiction and
for history, since one of the offspring of that rape, of the spoiling
of Leda's virtue--Helen--altered the course of the world. Interestingly,
James's Preface to The Spoils of Poynton mentions Helen, speculating on
"the passion, the faculties, the forces their [the furnishings'] beauty
would, like that of antique Helen of Troy, set in motion. "^

A further intertextual connection exists between Leda and Fleda in
the form of W. B. Yeats' s poem of 1924 "Leda and the Swan" and his
accompanying note. Lines nine through eleven foreshadow the Trojan War
and the death of Agamemnon, tragic events caused by Leda's daughters:

145

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead. 61

While no one expires in The Spoils, Poynton, its walls, roof, and

towers, burns, confusing the myth, James's novel, and Yeats' s poem.

Yeats 's note to the poem suggests further invagination by implicating,

in a metaphor, Oscar Cargill's explanation of Fleda's surname. Yeats

explains:

I wrote Leda and the Swan because the editor of a politi-
cal review [George Russell] asked me for a poem. I
thought, "After the individualist, demagogic movement,
founded by Hobbes and popularized by the Encyclopaedists
and the French Revolution, we have a soil so exhausted
that it cannot grow that crop again for centuries. "62

If, in playing word games, one does not voice the initial consonant
in Fleda's surname, one arrives at "fetch," according to the OED, an
obscure form of vetch. The obscure form has myriad implications for the
deconstruction of Fleda Vetch by insisting upon her hymeneal function and
feature, her imagination. As a verb, "fetch" can mean to fetch and
carry, to run backward and forward with news, tales, and the like, a
role Fleda fills as mediator. The term can also mean to derive a word
etymologically, a process on whose revelations we are speculating at
this yery minute, as we read.

The many definitions of the noun "fetch" are even more intriguing,
since all suggest doubleness, a condition entered into by the hymen
(and by the imagination). According to the OED, a fetch is variously
defined, in its first substantive definition as: (1) a contrivance,
dodge, strategem, trick; (2) an act of tacking; (3) an indrawn breath,
a sigh; (4) a decoy bird; (5) a roundabout phrase, a circumlocution.

146
In its second substantive meaning, it is (6) an apparition, the double,
or wraith of a living person. The first and fourth definitions suggest
the duplicity to which Fleda admits when she notes that she plays a
"double game." The fifth, a rhetorical definition, more pointedly
implies the encompassing, embracing function of the hymen, as defined by
Derrida, and suggests further its delaying and deferring structure, its
process of disseminating terms within its folds. Fleda briefly alludes
to her rhetorical function several times in the text but never so overtly
as when she tells Mrs. Gereth that she shall convince her to return the
treasures to Poynton Park. When Mrs. Gereth asks how Fleda shall
convince her, Fleda replies, using beautifully parallel rhetorical
structure: "Why, by putting the question well before you; by being so
eloquent that I shall persuade you, shall act on you; by making you
sorry for having gone so far," she said boldly. "By simply and
earnestly asking it of you, in short; and by reminding you at the same
time that it's the first thing I ever have so asked" (pp. 121-22). The
second and third definitions imply types of hymeneal structures, the
sail and the diaphragm. Derrida notes the sail, which plays back and
forth with the wind in the tacking process, among "taut, resistant
tissues, such as webs and veils: other hymens. Similarly, in the
breathing process, the diaphragm plays back and forth with each inhala-
tion and exhalation. Definition six, of course, recalls yet another
sort of hymen, that perfect representation of presence and absence:
the ghost.

As we have seen, the \iery names of the "double centers," of the
text, Poynton and Fleda Vetch, make ultimately for a dea(r)th of

147
signification. Meaning gets lost in the hymen, in the in-between,
making the novel a fetch, a circumlocution that defies closure. The
novel begins with premonitions of dread, a term that expresses a
deferential experience. One only dreads that which has not yet
occurred: dread is a presence that expresses an absence, a term akin
to desire. Fleda's first words in the novel are, in fact, "Isn't it
too dreadful?," referring, of course, to the Waterbath decor. Reitera-
ted twice more in the following paragraph, the term is repeated several
times more in the ensuing chapters. And, although the word "dreadful"
itself does not appear in the concluding chapter, several suggestions
of dread do. First, the concluding chapter, which narrates Fleda's
receipt of Owen's "signed desire" that she go to Poynton to choose a
gift and her arrival at the train station, emphasizes the text's
deferential character. The ultimate "conclusion" is delayed again and
again, demonstrating the truth of Kenneth Graham's observation that
"often there is as much significant waiting in a James novel as in a
Chekhov play."64 Fleda thinks that collecting Owen's gift "was an hour
to dream of and watch for; to be patient was to draw out the sweetness"
(p. 260). Second, the sound structure of the paragraphs relating the
final deferring action, Fleda's trip to Poynton, further recalls the
early repetition of the word "dread" and delays the final revelation of
the fire. The high concentration of words beginning with the letter "d'
reinforces the dread soon to be fulfilled by the revelation of absence.
Even before she resolves to leave, Fleda looks "from the doorstep, up
and down the dark street." The text continues:

148

The December dawn was dolorous . . . and the atmosphere
of West Kensington . . . was like a dirty old coat that
had been bettered by a dirty old brush. . . . Something,
in a dire degree . . . had begun to press on her heart:
it was the sudden imagination of a disaster. . . . But
nothing could happen save a dismayed discovery that
. . . the master and mistress of the house had already
come back. ... At last it was already there, though
the darkness of the day had deepened, (pp. 262-63)

Fleda's hymeneal purpose throughout has been to delay Owen and Mona's
marriage, and just as delay has been the subject of the first paragraph
of Chapter One (Mrs. Gereth "should n't be able to wait even till church-
time for relief: breakfast was at Waterbath a punctual meal, and she
had still nearly an hour on her hands" [p. 3]), so is it the subject of
the concluding paragraphs of Chapter Twenty-Two (Fleda, realizing that
Poynton is lost, returns with the porter to the waiting room, where she
sees a clock: '"Is there an up-train?' 'In seven minutes,1" and then
another echo of the beginning, "She covered her face with her hands"
(p. 266). Time, in fact, has been deferred since the appearance in the
frontispiece of the clock and its reflection in the mirror.

Even the title functions as a fetch, which defers meaning, situa-
ting the action of the novel in the hymen between presence and absence.
The term "spoil," as we have already noted, signifies the absence of a
once-present: spoiling a city, by stripping it of its goods, creates
a void where one did not exist. Accordingly, spoiling a woman creates
a similar absence. The play of presence and absence is repeated by
the proper noun "Poynton," during the novel alternately filled and
emptied. "Point," its cognate, punned on throughout the novel (the age
of Louis Seize wants "in taste and point"; Mrs. Brigstock speaks "with-
out effectual point"; what Fleda does "required no pointing out"; Owen

149
is asked "point-blank" whether he loves Fleda), likewise suggests in its
many meanings simultaneous presence and absence. Between the two terms
of the title, Spoils and Poynton, occurs another hymen of sorts — the
word "of"-- a preposition, which signals relationship, but serves
essentially as a blank, an empty space.

What, then, is the meaning, the theme of The Spoils of Poynton?
Philip L. Greene calls the theme "the heroics of concealment," the
novel one of "displaced passion."65 Michael Egan claims in no uncertain
terms that "the clash of generations is the theme of The Spoils of
Poynton."66 If we recognize the hymeneal structure of the novel,
however, we may dispense with the search for meaning or theme that leads
to such disparate and unsatisfactory answers. "The fold, then, and the
blank: these will forbid us to seek a theme or an overall meaning in
an imaginary, intentional, or lived domain beyond all textual instances,"
Derrida reminds us. ' By reading the "double centers," Poynton and
Fleda, as hymens, we can recognize The Spoils of Poynton as a sort of
lover's discourse, a narrative of desire: Mrs. Gereth's for the perfec-
tion of art she finds in Poynton, and Fleda's for Owen's love. Desire,
like the hymen, like yet another supplement — the narrative itself—
engages in the play of absence and presence; thus, the text shapes
itself, like the relationship between Mrs. Gereth and Fleda, "almost
wholly on breaches and omissions" (p. 253). What, given the hymeneal
construct, is the fate of meaning in The Spoils of Poynton? Dissemi-
nated within the folds and blanks, "nothing could be more marked than
its absence--an absence that simply spoke volumes" (p. 136).

150

Notes

T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1950), p. 9.

Ford Madox Hueffer, Portraits from Life (Boston: Houghton-
Mifflin, 1937), p. 8. Laurence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), p. 88.

Fleda's sympathizers are led by Hueffer, who calls her "the
apotheosis of civilization ... an angel" in Henry James: A Critical
Study (London: Octagon, 1918), pp. 34-35. Patrick Quinn, "Morals and
Motives in The Spoils of Poynton," The Sewanee Review, 62, No. 4 (1954),
563-577, speaks for Fleda's detractors when he calls her "an agent of
destruction."

4See the discussion offered by Jule S. Kaufman, "The Spoils of
Poynton: In Defense of Fleda Vetch," Arizona Quarterly, 35, No. 4
(1979), 342-56.

Alan H. Roper, "The Moral and Metaphorical Meaning of The Spoils
of Poynton," American Literature, 32, No. 2 (1960), 182.

"Bradford Booth, "Henry James and the Economic Motif," Nineteenth-
Century Fiction, 8, No. 2 (1953), 141-150. Carren 0. Kaston, "Emersonian
Consciousness and The Spoils of Poynton," ESQ: A Journal of the American
Renaissance, 26, No. 99, o.s. (1980), 97.

'Mark Krupnick, "Playing with the Silence: Henry James's Poetics
of Loss," Forum (University of Houston), 13, No. 3 (1976), p. 37.

Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton (New York: Scribner's, 1908),
p. 249. All page references appearing parenthetically within the text
are to this edition. Although Fleda Vetch uses this phrase to refer to
Ricks, the remark applies equally to Poynton, as Richard Gill has
demonstrated in Happy Rural Seat: The English Country House and the
Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1972) ,
p. 71.

yThe Dumas analogue is cited by Holland, p. 102; the Maupassant by
Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan, 1961),
pp. 218-19; the Balzac by Adeline Tintner, '"The Old Things': Balzac's
Le Cure de Tours and James's The Spoils of Poynton," Ni neteenth-Century
Fiction, 26, No. 4 (1972), 436-55; and the Ibsen by Michael Egan, Henry
James: The Ibsen Years (London: Vision Press, 1972), p. 83.

Barbara Johnson, Introd., Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: The Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), pp. xxvii-xxviii .

151

For an implied comparison between mirror and hymen, see Jacques
Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981), esp. p. 315. Like the hymen, "the mirror takes
place ... as something designed to be broken."

12
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 27, n. 27.

1 3

'Derrida, Dissemination, p. 27, n. 27.

14
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 44.

1 5
Henry James, The Art of the Novel , ed. Richard P. Blackmur

(New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 119.

16James, The Art of the Novel , p. 119.

In her notes to Dissemination, p. 26, n. 26, Barbara Johnson
explains: "Behind the word 'point' lies Lacan's notion of the point de
capiton [in upholstery or quilting, a stitch], by which he translates
the Greek word lekton, which he is substituting for the Saussurian
notion of the 'signified.'" Jacques Derrida, "Restitutions of Truth to
Size," trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., Research in Phenomenology (1978),
p. 1.

1 8
Henry James, The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F. 0. Matthiessen

and Kenneth B. Murdock (1974; rpt. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press,

1981), pp. 136-37.

19James, The Notebooks, p. 199.

20James, The Notebooks, p. 249.

James, The Notebooks, p. 208.

22James, The Art of the Novel , p. 122.

°Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974),
pp. 144-145.

24
Matthiessen and Murdock, p. 251.

25James, The Art of the Novel, p. 123.

26James, The Art of the Novel, p. 126.

27James, The Art of the Novel , p. 127.

28Egan, p. 77.

152

Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278-79.

30Gill, p. 6.

31Gill, p. 21.

32Gill, p. 19.

33
Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Scribner's, 1908),

I, 73.

34
James, The Portrait of a Lady, I, 64.

35James, The Portrait of a Lady, II, 418.

^"Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard
(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 145.

37Todorov, p. 155.

For the intimate relationship of text to textile, see Roland
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 64.

39Cargill, p. 243, no. 46.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 44.

41 1 use the English definitions offered by the Compact Edition of
the Oxford English Dictionary.

For French definitions, I have consulted the Dictionnaire Le

Robert.

43Derrida, "Restitutions of Truth to Size," p. 1.

401d wives (and old nuns) have it that patent-leather shoes are
indecent since they reflect a young lady's undergarments.

Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1981), p. 165.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 212.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 271.

Derrida, Dissemination, pp. 271-272.

49Holland, p. 99.

153

Gill, p. 64.

51
Derritia, Dissemination, p. 261.

52
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 262.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 262.

^Owen, too, is said to be blank on at least four occasions. (See
p. 161, where he is said to be blank twice, p. 188, and p. 197.) As
heir to the family estate, he, in an earlier era, would have been known
as Poynton. His blankness only reinforces the significant absence
suggested by the name of his estate.

55
Warren Chappell , A Short History of the Printed Word (Boston:

Nonpareil Books, 1970), p. 56.

56
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 246.

57
Derrida, Dissemination, p. 215.

58Roper, 191-192.

59Cargill, p. 241, n. 30.

60James, The Art of the Novel, p. 127.

61W. B. Yeats, "Leda and the Swan," in The Norton Anthology of
Modern Poetry, ed. Richard Ellmann and Robert 0' Clair (New York: Norton,
1973), p. 134.

See The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, notes to "Leda and the
Swan," p. 134, n. 1.

CO -

Jacques Derrida, Spurs/Eperons, trans. Barbara Harlow (Chicago
and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 41.

Kenneth Graham, Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 150-151, n. 13.

65Philip L. Greene, "Point of View in The Spoils of Poynton,"
Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 21, No. 4 (1967), 361.

66Egan, p. 80.

°'Derrida, Dissemination, p. 251.

CHAPTER FIVE
THE WINGS OF METAPHOR IN THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

DUKE: And what's her history?

VIOLA: A blank, my lord. She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' th' bud,
Feed on her damask cheek. She pined in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed?

■ 1

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, II. iv. 109-115
In an early review of The Wings of the Dove appearing in the Times
Literary Supplement, an anonymous reviewer pronounced what remains, even
today, an indisputable commentary on the novel: "it is not an easy book

to read. It will not do for short railway journeys or for drowsy

2
hammocks, or even to amuse sporting men and the active Young Person."

Oscar Cargill concurs, admitting that The Wings of the Dove is not even

for every reader of Henry James. Indeed, although the novel shares

much with the earlier The Portrait of a Lady (both depict the heroine as

a portrait trapped, in some way, within a frame) and the later The

Golden Bowl (both present improper love affairs between Europeans at the

expense of a young American heiress), readers prefer the meditations of

Isabel Archer and the intrigues of Maggie Verver.

I certainly do not mean to imply that The Wings of the Dove is

either justifiably or unjustifiably ignored. Many critics consider it

James's best work, but even they are often puzzled as to why. Our

154

155

contact with the heroine, a rarified being dying of a mysterious disease,

is sharply limited, as is our sympathy at learning of her death in

Venice. James's syntax is frequently difficult to follow. Moreover,

the novel refuses to settle on a genre: is it drama, fairy tale,

romance? Such a confused response should and does lead us back to the

text for answers. What we find is that we are at sea because meaning

is suspended and folded into The Wings of the Dove. Because of the play

of language, the immediacy, the "presence" most readers have come to

expect from a "realistic" novel has been decentered and delayed: our

literary competence has betrayed us. Meaning has moved from the center

of the text, where we expect to find it, out to the boundaries, the

edges, the margins. These, and not what James refers to as his "buried

center" in Book Five, are what mark the text and texture of The Wings

of the Dove.

Meaning, of course, does not actually migrate from one place, the

center, to another, the margin. It never was and never can be fixed.

Rather, caught in the play of difference, it forever eludes our grasp.

Although we yearn for the "transcendental signified," some sort of

ultimate, stable meaning, it too is a fiction. John Carlos Rowe

explains that, given the nature of the novel, attempts to fix meaning

are tantamount to conspiracy:

The signs constituting the text are the only reality of
the work. To transcend the world of the novel is simply
to escape its confines and substitute another system of
related signs for its meaning. ... If a novel drama-
tizes its essential fictional ity, as The Wings of the
Dove repeatedly does, then the attempt to determine
final meaning is a violation of the work's aesthetic
integrity. 4

156
In recognizing the impossibility of recovering meaning fixed at some
originary moment or site, we agree to the decentering of a text. By
"decentering" I mean cancelling and nullifying the concept of origin.
In a decentered system, the transcendental signified, that is the
ultimate meaning recognized by a logocentric metaphysics of presence,
is, according to Jacques Derrida, "never absolutely present outside a
system of differences. "^ A favorite metaphor for the center, the
origin, the logos, is the father; thus in a decentered system the
concept of the privileged father-author is also decentered. Metaphor-
ically, the family tie that binds is cut, and the text is set free.

The Wings of the Dove begins with what may be read as a reverse
allegory (since the narrative offers a literal representative of a
metaphoric event instead of the other way around) of an occurrence
Derrida calls the rupture of the center: Kate Croy returns to her
father's house to break with him and with her squalid origins. Although
Kate insists that the broken sentence of her family existence end "with
a sort of meaning," that meaning, since her text is effectively
"decentered," will be subject to and diffused through the laws of
difference.

By allegorically equating the absent father with the absent gram-
matological origin, however, we apparently fall into a logical bind.
For allegory, by traditional standards, is a narrative which continu-
ously refers to another absent structure of events or ideas. The
deferred (because not immediate) structure, for example the political
story of Queen Elizabeth in Spenser's The Faerie Queene, is considered
to be an origin of the allegorical narrative. The traditional view of

157
allegory, then, requires an effort of mind that flies in the face of
deconstruct!' on, since, by its nature, allegory apparently suggests the
existence of ultimate meaning. The Wings of the Dove has long been
read as just that sort of allegory: Mil 1 y , the dove, the suffering
Christ figure, converts and redeems the sinful but repentant Densher.

Paul de Man, however, presents a broader vision of the allegorical
mode, one that is compatible with deconstructive theory. Allegory,
de Man explains, "designates primarily a distance in relation to its
own origin, and renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it
establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference.' In
allegory the relationship between sign and meaning is discontinuous
since "the sign points to something that differs from its literal

meaning and has for its function the thematization of this difference."0
Indeed, in all writing the relationship between sign and meaning is
allegorical, and so allegory becomes a metaphor of all reading and
writing. Using de Man's definition to see The Wings of the Dove as an
allegory, we can read the novel as a paradigm of textuality containing
several homologous texts which insist upon its paradigmatic character.
Both the main text and the embedded ones deconstruct their apparent
integrity, first by insisting on their own lack of center, then by re-
vealing the gaps and edges in the textual fabric, and finally by
refusing final meaning, and placing it in textual spaces, folds, and
margins.

From the very first Kate inhabits a decentered world where meaning
is deferred in a number of ways. We see, after all, not Kate, but her
mirrored reflection: a graphic representation of difference. Her

158
representation is both different, in space, from her actual self and
deferred in time, if we consider the infinitesimal amount of time that
must elapse for a reflection to be perceived. Both the difference and
the deferment are reflected by the syntax of the oft-commented opening
sentence of the novel, which delays first grammatical and then visual
presentation of the subject. Further the opening sentence mimics
the differential action of reflection by repetition of feminine pro-
nouns:

She waited, Kate Croy, for her father to come in, but he
kept her unconscionably, and there were moments at which
she showed herself, in the glass over the mantel, a face
positively pale with the irritation that had brought her
to the point of going away without sight of him."
(I, 3, my emphasis)

And just as the concept of difference forms the boundary between
presence and absence, Kate, in uniting opposites, maintains the distinc-
tions between them: "She had stature without height, grace without
motion, presence without mass . . . More 'dressed,' often, with fewer
accessories, than other women, or less dressed, should occasion require,
with more . . ." (I, 5). Although the presentation of Kate hints at it,
by the end of Book First, Chapter One, the rupture Derrida discusses in
"Structure, Sign, and Play" is complete: the privileged father in the
text has been renounced and the play of difference has taken over.

Fathers, authors, and substitutes for them do, in fact, become
powerless in The Wings of the Dove, echoing, in literal terms the
decentered origin of the novel's linguistic universe. While Lionel Croy
stands renounced, in effect dead for Kate, other fathers and husbands
are truly deceased, for example, the Messrs. Condrip, Stringham, and
Manningham. Kate's brothers are dead as well, both, in a sense,
casualties of death by drowning, an image of ultimate deferment into the

159
abyss: the first has died of yellow fever contracted at a summer
watering place, and the second has drowned while bathing. Milly, of
course, is entirely bereft of relations. Other potential father-figures,
allegories of origin, are impotent in one way or another. Lord Mark
and Merton Densher, for instance, lack the economic goods, "goods"
being a Derridean substitute for father, origin, and power, to fully
succeed in their social realms. Densher, moreover, is a writer whose
"pen" will not produce. Recall that at the end he tells Milly that he
has stayed in Venice to write, when, in fact, he is doing no writing
whatsoever. Sir Luke Strett, likewise, wields a phallic symbol, the
knife, but he, too, is ineffectual in dealing with the uncut volume of
Milly Theale.

The opening scene of Kate's renunciation of her origins only begins
to hint at a deep narrative instability woven into The Wings of the
Dove. Point of view, the traditionally stable fix a piece of writing
takes on a subject, shifts continually in the novel, from Kate, to
Milly, to Densher. Moreover, from time to time, the point of view is
unidentifiable or moves suddenly from a voice inside to one outside the
text. At this moment, which Barthes calls a dissolve, control dis-
appears, "leaving a gap which enables the utterance to shift from one
point of view to another, without warning: the writing is set up
across this tonal instability . . . which makes it a glistening texture
of ephemeral origins." Further insisting on the decentered origin of
the text is James's own prefatory "despair at the inveterate displace-
ment of his general centre."'0 His middle does not occur at the
physical halfway point. Instead, James locates "the whole actual centre

160
of the work, resting on a misplaced pivot and lodged in Book Fifth."11
In just such a way, the "center" has decentered, deferred the middle
point out toward the wide reaches of the blank margins.

In fact, James never insists on the concept of a center in The
Wings of the Dove. In the Preface, he uses three metaphors to describe
the composition of the novel, and each comparison deconstructs to reveal
in the metaphor and so in the text a space, a gap, or an edge. First,
in his discussion of narrative centers, James describes portions of text
as "sufficiently solid blocks of wrought material, squared to the sharp
edge, as to have weight and mass and carrying power." Then he treats
his intention: each block was to have a full presence, "Terms of
amplitude, terms of atmosphere, those terms, and those terms only, in
which images assert their fulness and roundness, their power to revolve,
so that they have sides and backs, parts in the shade as true as parts
in the sun."'*- Intended as a blueprint for narrative coherence, James's
block method of building text insists, instead, on disjunction, for the
blocks do not admit presence. On revision James mourns for them and
what they suggest: "the absent values, the palpable voids, the missing
links, the mocking shadows, that reflect, taken together, the early
bloom of one s good faith." As we will see, our eyes continually
focus on the disjunction, on the omnipresent sharp edges and the space,
minute though it may be, between the blocks.

Alvin Langdon Coburn's frontispiece to Volume One of The Wings of
the Dove illustrates my point. Entitled "The Doctor's Door," the photo-
graph, too, is an artful conposition of blocks of many sizes and
textures. The door itself is a rectangle embedded with six rectangular

161

shapes, yet the significant elements on the door, the doorknob, which
admits patients, and the number and the nameplate, which identify the
residence, exist in the spaces between the blocks. Other blocks alter-
nate with the brick facade of the house to form an unusual arch around
the door. Between this arch of blocks and the block pattern forming
the door lies another significant marginal area, this a stained or leaded
glass window resembling a sunset or a sunrise, both uncertain, borderline
times of day. Even the pattern of the pavement is remarkable for the
strong contrast created by the light stones and the dark spaces between
them. Compositionally these dark gaps point upwards toward the door
and its marginal devices.

In addition to employing the architectural metaphor of building
a text, like a bridge, with blocks, James likens the composition of his
novel to that of a play by noting its combination of picture and scene.
Each block of narrative has its own integrity, and in constructing each
block, the writer chooses his method of treatment, thus making for
consistency, James insists. "In this truth resides the secret of the
discriminated occasion — that aspect of the subject which we have our
noted choice of treating either as picture or scenically, but which is
apt, I think, to show its fullest worth in the Scene. "'^ The most evo-
cative textual instance, however, occurs when the boundary, the space
between picture and scene is called into question. James revels in such
undecidable moments: "Beautiful exceedingly, for that matter, those
occasions or parts of an occasion when the boundary line between picture
and scene bears a little the weight of the double pressure." '5

162

Continuing, James cites "the long passage that forms here before us the

opening of Book Fourth" as an example of such a passage where picture

and scene impinge on each other exerting pressure on their boundary.

In a short passage within a longer passage, we may note an example of

the larger structure to which James refers:

She thrilled, she consciously flushed, and all to turn pale
again, with the certitude — it had never been so present —
that she should find herself completely involved: the yery
air of the place, the pitch of the occasion, had for her
both so sharp a ring and so deep an undertone. The smallest
things, the faces, the hands, the jewels of the women, the
sound of words, especially of names, across the table, the
shape of the forks, the arrangement of the flowers, the
attitude of the servants, the walls of the room, were all
touches in a picture and denotements in a play; and they
marked for her moreover her alertness of vision. She had
never, she might well believe, been in such a state of
vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp for her
comfort. ... (I, 148)

The first sentence of the passage stages a scene of Milly in her typical
differential pose, where she incorporates opposites--flushing then
paling — not in an effort to resolve their dialectic but simply to main-
tain them. She notes, for example, in the pitch of the occasion, both
"so sharp a ring and so deep an undertone." Immediately following, the
next sentence declares itself to be a picture by listing the elements
that compose the room and then calling them "all touches in a picture."
Leaving the picture, the next sentence picks up on the musical imagery
of the earlier sentence, even reiterating the term "sharp," and offers
another scene of Milly "in vibration." The word "vibration" furthers
the musical image pattern and evokes another nice image of difference in
that vibration denotes never-ending movement between opposite poles,
more accurately, "a periodic motion of the particles of an elastic body

163
or medium in alternately opposite directions from the position of equi-

1 r

librium. Her father-origin, the source of equilibrium, removed,
Mil 1 y is forever in vibration. Taken as a passage, however, the
boundaries are made to bear "a little the weight of the double pressure":
the passage works as picture and scene by creating a powerful scene of
Mil 1 y coming to consciousness within the picture of life at Lancaster
Gate. This passage, a miniature of the larger example James offers in
the Preface, functions as it does--to bring everything "to a head"--
because its functional boundaries call our attention to it.

Boundaries, limits, and margins are also revealed as integral to
understanding the third metaphor of composition named in the Preface.
James conceives of the form as a medal: Milly's poor health is but
half the story: the other half details her effect on those close to
her. James's stated intention is to make his medal "hang free, its
obverse and its reverse, its face and its back, would beautifully become
optional for the spectator." Moreover, he continues, he "wanted them
correspondingly embossed, wanted them inscribed and figured with an
equal salience."' Traditional readers of James note that he does
indeed accomplish his purpose: as he says, "The medal did hang free."
Companion scenes, for example, proliferate: the party at Lancaster Gate
in Volume One is mirrored by the party at Milly's Venetian villa in
Volume Two; in Volume One the Bronzino portrait reflects the action,
while in Volume Two, Veronese's "Marriage at Cana" provides the template
for the narrative; Volume One presents a requisite scene at Marian
Condrip's as does Volume Two. Such repetition implies the existence of
gaps in the text, holes which necessitate folding and supplementary

164
stitching to close. Moreoever, a medal is bounded by an edge, often
distinctly marked with scores called "milling," which separates one
side from the other. Such an edge is physically present in the two-
volume New York Edition of the novel though it is erased in reprints.
By virtue of the edge, we are limited to perceiving one side of a medal
at a time.

The metaphor of the medal invites further discussion both in
light of Derrida's discussion of metaphor in "White Mythology" and in
liqht of the currents of economic concern coursing through the novel.
A medal, given an economic value--and economics are a constant, even a
precipitating issue in The Wings of the Dove — becomes a coin. Shifting
James's stated emphasis ever so slightly, then, we can read the novel
as a coin, and a coin, according to Derrida, is a metaphor for metaphor.
As Jonathan Culler explains,

Concrete words have linguistic histories in other concrete
uses. These are coins, to use Derrida's metaphor, restamped
with some strange device. The question with which we are
tantalized (consider that example) is whether or not the
original face and obverse can still be detected by some
means or other. 18

"Metaphor," Derrida observes, "has always been defined as the trope

of resemblance; not simply between signifier and signified, but between

what are already two signs, the one designating the other. This is its

most general feature, and the one which justified us in including under

this name all the figures called symbolical or analogical. . . ."' In

this category Derrida includes allegory. Metaphor, regardless of how

one defines it more precisely, exists either in the gap between sense and

reference or in the space between one meaning and another. The space,

165
the blank, becomes the empty place, the void in which the reader inserts
his meaning in each act of reading. The coin of metaphor is subject to
wear and tear, an English rendition of what Derrida calls Usure, a term
that subverts itself. First, it means erasure by crumbling, wearing out.
It also carries the meaning of usury: "the additional product of a
certain capital, the process of exchange which, far from losing the
stake, would make that original wealth bear fruit, would increase the
return from it in the form of income, of higher interest, of a kind of

linguistic surplus value.'

In detailing the history of metaphor and the usury to which it is

subject, Derrida notes "how insistently the metaphorical process is

designated by the paradigm of coinage, of metal — gold and silver,"

Derrida continues:

Now before metaphor — a phenomenon of language — could be
metaphorically designated by an economic phenomenon, it was
necessary that interchange between the two "regions"
should be orchestrated by a more general analogy. . . . The
inscription on a coin is most often the point of crossover,
the scene of interchange between linguistics and economics.

Another scene of interchange between linguistics and economics exists

in the self-effacing metaphors having to do with linguistic usage. For

example, if an expression is frequently heard, we say that it is in

circulation or in common currency. A local koine, a near-homonymic

coin, produced by linguistic leveling, describes a local pidgin or

dialect. Yet another scene of interchange, we will see, is the poetic
text of Milly Theale.

Linguistics, economics, metaphor: the three are invariably linked
in Derridean theory and in The Wings of the Dove. And just as

166
linguistics and economics are related through metaphor, so language
and metaphor are linked by economics. First, however, we must under-
stand Derrida's rather narrow use of the term "economy." In her intro-
duction to Derrida's Of Grammatology, Gayatri Spivak offers her defini-
tion of the Derridean use: "Economy is a metaphor of energy—where two
opposed forces playing against each other constitute the so-called
identity of a phenomenon." An economy is a simultaneous occurrence of
opposing actions, "not a reconciliation of opposites," Spivak insists,
"but rather a maintaining of disjunction." She continues: "Identity
constituted by difference is economy."23 What is revealed by the two
faces of the medal that is The Wings of the Dove is just such an econo-
mic difference. Identity is constituted in the similar embossing of the
two sides of the medal, the companion scenes, the repetition of
phraseology, yet this identity exists in the difference, for example,
between the evoked Bronzino and Veronese. As the novel is an economy,
so is it a metaphor, and thus an allegory.

James's medal metaphor, we begin to realize, is appropriate to the
text for more reasons than those of repetition. By introducing the
concept of economy, it establishes a framework in which to discuss other
economics, which we recognize from our acquaintance with them in other
contexts, for example, in Hawthorne and in other Jamesian texts:
Europe, America; passive, active; cultured, uncivilized; experience,
innocence; age, youth; poor, rich; dark, light. The medal also works
as a metaphor for those non-dialectical opposites, which, never recon-
ciled, are disjunctively maintained. As even the most literal reader

167

understands, resolution is deferred: Mil 1 y dies, the lovers split, and

Europe and America and everything for which they are economic metaphors,

remain separated by the watery abyss.

Thus, from the Preface on, we find ourselves immediately entangled

in the differential structure of The Wings of the Dove. Inherent in

metaphor, as we have seen, difference is thus also an economic concept.

"Since," Derrida writes, "there is no economy without difference, it is

the most general structure of economy. "^4 Derrida spells difference

with an a, differance, to insist upon its twin properties of deferment

and differentiation. In one of his most lucid discussions of the

subject, Derrida defines his terms:

First, differance refers to the (active and passive)
movement that consists in deferring by means of delay,
delegation, reprieve, referral, detour, postponement,
reserving. In this sense differance is not preceded
by the originary and the indivisible unity of a present
possibility that I could reserve, like an expenditure
that I would put off calculatedly or for reasons of
economy. What defers presence, on the contrary, is the
very basis on which presence is announced or desired in
what represents it, its sign, its trace . . .25

Since differance and its characteristic temporal ization and spatializa-
tion is a structural condition of metaphor (and so language and writing),
we can say that economy, an aspect of differance, is inherent in allegory,
a particular metaphoric structure.

In The Wings of the Dove all of these intimately related issues are
at stake: differance (and its functions of differentiation and defer-
ment), metaphor, and economy. Milly and Kate are opposites, different
in nearly every way; Milly is at turns a fairy princess, a painting, a
dove; and economy, which proves a key to the differences between Kate and
Milly, also ultimately delays, as it turns out, the union between Kate

168
and Densher. Although absent from much of the novel --only two books
are narrated from her perspective—Mil ly is arguably the focus of The
Wings of the Dove. Her narrative, in any case, appears at the phys-
ical center-point of the novel. She is, moreover, the dove of the
title, and most critics designate her as an omnipresent center, a symbol
whose influence on those she touches transcends the boundaries of death.
She is, many would say, the symbol of the "transcendental signified."
John Carlos Rowe notes the tendency to give Milly central struc-
tural significance, but, he observes, "James's symbols are ambiguous
texts and remain 'symbolic' only insofar as they resist conventional
understanding and require an imaginative act of interpretation."
Much has been made by traditional criticism of the religious signifi-
cance of Milly' s sacrifice and her dove-like character to arrive at a
final meaning for the novel. Rowe argues, however, that James's use of
the myth undercuts the possibility of decisive significance:

The central myth of the novel — the Incarnation, Passion,
Crucifixion and Ascension of Christ--is manipulated to
destroy any possibility of fulfilled meaning. Milly's
association with the dove and the ultimate immanence of the
Holy Spirit evokes the ambiguity of the Word diffused in
the world by Christ's sacrifice. The novel remains a
world unto itself, any meaning beyond it being reduced to
silence and void. 27

Finally, Rowe concludes, the novel leans toward the level of allegory

with Milly in her role as "symbol of differences." Her death does not

and cannot reconcile irresolvable differences "but simply makes those

2ft
differences manifest."

Despite his argument with those who label Milly a transcendental

signified, Rowe nonetheless locates Milly at the center of the narrative.

169
How do we reconcile the tripartite structure of both the meaning seekers
and the silence finders with the two-sided medal structure devoid of
center offered in the Preface? In reality, they are the same structure
if we read Milly as an allegorical representation of the difference
between one side of the medal and the other and/or as the blank space
where a metaphor takes place. In either case Milly represents the empty
set, the symbol of disjunction maintained by economy. Indeed, as Rowe
notes, Milly is a symbol of differance (I choose Derrida's spelling to
insist upon its specialized implications): in human form, a metaphor
of text, an allegory of language.

The name Milly Theale suggests a host of textual metaphors appro-
priate expecially to this text. First, the term "mill," in addition to
commonly denoting a machine for grinding, is also used for a machine
invented by Antoine Brucher in the sixteenth century for stamping coins.
As a verb, "to mill" signifies the process of passing cloth, for example,
through a fulling mill, to thicken by fulling. Both meanings have
textual ramifications. The former recalls the medal of the Preface,
that metaphor of differance that names the structure of the text. The
latter meaning names the result of metaphoric language: a palpable
thickening of the cloth (read text). The last name presents interesting
interpretive possibilities. First, the name contains anagrams for
"heal" and "health," both terms raised by Milly's unnamed illness.
Second, an ambiguity exists in the pronunciation of the surname: are
the first two letters pronounced as a dental, as in the French theatre
or as a linguo-dental th as in our theatre? If one chooses the former,

170
he names a type of small duck, a word with relations, biological,
alliterative, and verbal (through the verb "dive"), to dove. We begin
to see that our heroine's name, like the medal, has two similarly
embossed sides, both of which present metaphors appropriate to the text
and self-reflexively refer to the text as text.

Although she is referred to as a fairy princess, the type of Amer-
ican girl, and the image of the Bronzino portrait, the metaphor of dove
is used most efficiently to describe Milly. The frontispiece of Volume
Two depicting a Venetian palace meant to represent Milly's villa even
resembles a baroque dovecote. Among the most frequently cited sentences
in the novel is that in which Milly is declared a dove, in the scene
where she makes her grand appearance dressed in white at the Venetian
palace: '"She's a dove,' Kate went on, 'and one somehow does n't think
of doves as bejewelled. Yet they [a string of pearls Milly is wearing]
suit her down to the ground'" (II, 218). In this same scene Milly is
presented as having taken on "the character of a symbol of differences."
Indeed she has: for in this scene more than in any other Milly is
presented as embodied poetry, a form that would not exist but for meta-
phor and differance. First, our attention is called to her pearls, which
are said to be especially suited to her. They are appropriate for
several reasons. First, pearl, a printing term, names a small size of
type, type being an appropriate ornament to Milly's blank page,
suggested by her white clothing. Pearls are also a metaphor for
writing: the pearl, we know, is formed by a sedimenting process in
which differentiated layers envelop each other. The production of a
pearl, a textual model, is instigated by an often unseen irritation.

171
Like Barthes' onion, a pearl, though layered, has no center, for the
irritation, the miniscule piece of sand, dissolves in the formation of
the jewel. The pearl, then, supplemented into existence, serves to
supplement Milly's text.

The dove metaphor further implies the structure of Milly and of
the text at large — and vice- versa — as we are reminded by the bird's
salient feature: its wings. The grammatically important element in the
title of the novel is "wings." "Dove" is relegated to a modifying pre-
positional phrase. Even Milly's first name with the two "L's" (ailes
is French for "wings") names that identifying characteristic of the
t(h)eal(e). (Interestingly, too, an "L" forms a right angle, a coin. )
The narrative specifically mentions Milly's wings at the most important
moment in her life: that is, her death. When Milly dies, Maud Manning-
ham notes: "'Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her
wonderful wings.' 'Yes--folded them,1" Densher replies (II, 356). As
a biological structure, wings signal differance: mirror images of each
other, they are the same, yet different. And, in folding, they imitate
the structure of text. In an extensive footnote (he tends to locate
important points in the marginal gaps) Derrida makes broadly suggestive
intimations of the significance of the metaphor of wings in a critique
of Mallarme's poem "Chastised Clown," a significant intertext for The
Wings of the Dove. Herewith, a translated excerpt from tne Mallarme
poem:

Her American lake where the Niagara winds,

The winds have been frothing the sea-grass, which pines:

"Shall we any more mirror her as in times past?"

For just as the seagull, o'er waves it has passed,

Enjoins joyous echoes or drops a wing feather,

172

She left her sweet mem'ry behind her forever!
Of all, what remains here? What can one show?
A name! . . .

And Derrida's (and Barbara Johnson's) note:

Wing feather [plume de 1 'aile] . . . her memory [souvenir
d'elle] ["aile (wing) rhymes with "elle" (she, her).--
Trans.] The unfolding of this aviary and of this fan is
perhaps infinite. Just to give an Idea of this defi
d'ailes ["challenge of the wings"; a i 1 es also sounds like
J.' s.— Trans.]: there is always a supplementary 1_. One
]_ too few (produces a fall) or one 1_ too many forms the
fold, "a spacious writing . . . folds back the too-much-
wing" (p. 859) guarantees the flight of the "winged writing"
(p. 173), of the "Wing that dictates his verses" (p. 155).
The wing, which can be "bleeding" (blank sense) and
"featherless" (p. 40), can also at times be held as a
quill ("Hold my wing in your hand," (p. 58). . . .29

What Derrida does here in his typically playful way is to set into motion

a chain of signification and in so doing, allow the text to demonstrate

its own deconstruction. As he continues: "These plays (on 'plume,' on

'winds,' etc.)"--and for our purposes, on "wing" — "are anathema to any

lexicological summation, any taxonomy of themes, any deciphering of

30
meaning." As a result of the play of Mallarme s text, however,

Derrida does demonstrate some of the textual ramifications of the wing

metaphor important for James's narrative as well. For example, Derrida's

marginal comments on the wing imply the action of the pen (plume) and

the written and folded nature of the text. And if we read James

through this Derridean scrim, we begin to see Mil 1 y as an encompassing

metaphor of text, in all her economic, numismatic, and ornithological

aspects.

The narrative names Milly's textual nature repeatedly. She is

called "the princess in a conventional tragedy" (I, 120); the wealth

that defines her for Kate and Densher "lurked between the leaves of the

173
uncut but antiquated Tauchnitz volume" (I, 121); money gives poetry to
the life Milly clings to (II, 341) she is "food for fiction, food for
poetry" (II, 81), a New England heroine (I, 201), and a creature
"straight out of a fairy tale" (I, 215). Even James's use of slang and
other informal speech is colored by Milly' s textual character. Her
story, for instance, is grist for Densher's scribbling mill (we catch
the pun) (II, 43); and, like Winterbourne in Daisy Miller, Milly is
"booked" to be misled (I, 192). Her past is definitively textual: at
turns it is called a "New York history, confused as yet but multitud-
inous" and "a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation" (I,
105-106). Both "history," coming down to us as an economy of fact and
fiction, from the French histoire, and "legend," are, as Hayden White
has demonstrated, narratives subject to the play of language. ' Milly
is thus presented as the fictional product of another fiction, that of
her family, a narrative deferred in The Wings of the Dove.

Projected as a textual construct from within the narrative, Milly
is very often seen as a derivative intertextual creation as well. Like
her pearls, she is the product of a process of sedimentation. Oscar
Cargiil cites Iseult of medieval romance as Milly's prototype. 2 Bio-
graphical critics point to James's beloved cousin, whose initials match
Milly Theale's, as the template for the tragic young woman. Contex-
tual-developmental critics point to James's earlier efforts at wealthy

but star-crossed heroines like Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer as earlier

"34
essays at the heiress of jill ages. Some even choose Christopher

Newman as the painting beneath the painting; Milly does, in fact,

reprise Newman's earlier role as the rich innocent cast into the den

174
of scheming Europeans, even repeating his scene in the art gallery among
the copyists.

While Jamesian and other analogues hint at Milly's textual
"origin," her particularly textual consciousness goes further in demon-
strating Milly's entanglement with narrative. Very like Isabel Archer,
Milly assesses her world through her textual experience, and just as
Isabel notes that Lord Warburton is just like an English lord in a novel
and then proceeds on her reading of the role, Milly, in a similar
manner, tells Mrs. Stringham that Kate is the wondrous London girl of
which she has conceived from far back: "conceived from the tales of
travellers and the anecdotes of New York, from old porings over Punch
and a liberal acquaintance with the fiction of the day" (I, 171). Her
sympathy for the Condrips' plight results from her experience with
Thackeray and Dickens. Charles Anderson comments that this is one of
James's favorite strategies.

This enfolding process, that is, the employment of fictions to
illuminate fictions, does not necessarily make for metaphoricity and
allegory, though it may suggest their possibilities. Milly's nature and
activity must belong to the realm of metaphor to make her a credible
vehicle in the allegory I am asserting. The layers of textual refer-
ences that make for her character, that layer by layer by layer supple-
ment her into existence, reveal at center an emptiness. Like the
exquisitely appointed parlor in her London hotel, Milly, too, is a
"great garnished void" (II, 256). Her name, Milly, suggests the circu-
lar form of a millstone. This shape, in meeting itself in its formation,
nullifies its origin and presents an empty inside. Or, like the uncut

175
Tauchnitz volume, Milly's folding makes much of her text an effective
blank. She appears wearing either all black or as on the occasion of
the party at her Venetian villa, all white. Charles R. Anderson notes
the contradictory implications of Milly's wearing white and the rela-
tionship of her festal garb with her daily dress: "White is the most
ambiguous of colors: the dress of a bride, the garment of the dead; a
symbol of innocence, purity, holiness, and at the same time a symbol of
nothingness. . . ." Milly's dress as hostess on her festal evening is
the opposite of 'her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black.'"0'
The many coded, supplementary meanings of her white dress suggest, in
their supplementarity, an underlying void, an absence further insisted
upon by "her inveterate black. "^ Although opposites, both black and
white are devoid of color and suggest identical if not complementary
empty spaces.

As implied by her name and dress, Mil 1 y is essentially a blank, a
tabula rasa on which everyone is ready to make his own identifying mark.
Lord Mark, especially, is eager to impress himself upon Milly. In
making her over for himself as the Bronzino portrait, he implies her
narrative stature; for a painting shares much with a written text: both
depend on underlying blanks, the portrait on an empty canvas, the
fiction on a blank sheet of paper; both are supplemented into presence,
the portrait by paints, the fiction by words; both may be effaced and
repainted or rewritten by more of the same. In "Plato's Pharmacy,"
Derrida sees writing as similar to painting: "Thus just as painting and
writing have faithfulness to the model as their model, the resemblance
between painting and writing is precisely resemblance itself: both

176
operations must aim above all at resembling." The operation, however is
impossible to perform, and poetry and painting are far away from the
truth. Both are deferred representation, that take place in the void,
but in slightly different ways. Painting and sculpture are silent
images of silent subjects: silence in these media is normal. But
writing is also silent despite the fact that it presents itself as the

image of speech. Thus painting, but even more so writing, is estranged

39
from the truth of the thing itself: it is differentiated.

The portrait at hand has been identified as Bronzino's portrait of

Lucrezia Panciatichi, and now that portrait appears on the cover of the

Norton Critical Edition, taking a place alongside "The Doctor's Door"

and "The Venetian Palace" is pictorial intertexts for The Wings of the

Dove. Several details of the portrait suggest further instances of

Milly's metaphoricity as text. First, the green beads, the jewels of

the portrait (metamorphosed into Milly's pearls) record the carved

legend: Amour dure sans fin. Charles Anderson notes that "No motto

40
could be more exact for the love bestowed on all by Milly." The motto

interests me, however, for near rhyme in amour dure, love endures, and

the repetition of similar nasals in sans fin, without end. As Derrida

comments, rhyme is "the general law of textual effects — is the folding

41
together of an identity and a difference." With Lucrezia holding a

book, the portrait further becomes like Milly, a little metaphor of text

with the meanings of all the texts diffused in abyssed linguistic play:

the Latin text of a hymn to the Virgin printed on the visible page of

the book held by Lucrezia, the text of the beads, the text of the

portrait, and the text of Milly all become intertextual filters of The

Wings of the Dove. Appropriately, Lady Aldershaw looks at Milly

177
"quite as if Mil 1 y had been the Bronzino and the Bronzino only Milly"
(I, 223). Indeed, they are the same. Milly's cryptic statement on
the occasion of being shown the Bronzino--" I shall never be better than
this" (I, 221)--has prompted much critical commentary. Most interpret
this insight as Milly's conscious recognition of her impending death.
Truly, this interpretation becomes doubly significant if we accept an
allegorical reading of Milly and the Bronzino as reflecting twin meta-
phors of text. For, as Derrida says of both efforts: "The magic of
writing and painting is like a cosmetic concealing the dead under the
appearance of the living."42

Lord Mark is not the only one, however, to engage Milly as a text.
Kate, Susan, and Densher write individualized fictions for Milly, thus
insisting on her blankness and so her textuality. Their understandings
of Milly are based on the readings each is predisposed to find, and so
each relationship becomes a sort of paradigm of reader-response criti-
cism. As John Carlos Rowe comments, all the other characters, "make
Milly over in their own images.' Kate, of course, declares Milly a
dove, whose folding wings, in turn declare its function as textual
metaphor, as we have seen. Her choice of metaphor, a dove denoting a
messenger of peace and deliverance from anxiety, a gentle innocent or
loving woman or child, actually says more about herself, for she offers
the dove comparison after having presented Milly's relationship with
herself and her aunt as one of economic expedience, as a business
arrangement to be fraught, undoubtedly, with divisiveness and suffer-
ing. Something in Kate's text causes Milly to think that she is "a
creature who paced like a panther" (I, 282). My guess is that Milly

178

reads Kate as a panther first because Kate presents herself as such

and second because in describing Milly as a dove Kate is consciously

playing off her sense of the differences between herself and the

American girl .

Susan Stringham reads Milly as a fairy princess, in accordance

with her flair for the romantic and the dramatic. It is through her

perspective alone that we see Milly "alone" and "stricken," as the

product of "a New York legend of affecting, of romantic isolation."

She alone peoples Milly's past with "free-living ancestors, handsome

dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts" (I, 111): the

cast of a popular gothic novel. Milly's plight creates in Susan "and

we give it in her own words — the sense of a harrowing pathos" (I, 110).

Susan's "reckless connexion with the 'picture papers' " prompts her to

describe Milly using romantic hyperbole and exotic references — just the

sort of description that would suit the Transcript and her perception

of her role as a major contributor:

it was rich, romantic, abysmal, to have, as was evident,
thousands and thousands a year, to have youth and intelli-
gence and, if not beauty, at least in equal measure a
high dim charming ambiguous oddity, which was even better,
and then on top of all to enjoy boundless freedom, the
freedom of the wind in the desert--it was unspeakably
touching to be so equipped and yet to have been reduced
by fortune to little humble-minded mistakes. (I, 110)

And just as Milly registers Kate's perception of herself as predator,

she similarly views Susan Stringham as her fairy godmother. On the

occasion of the dinner at Lancaster Gate, Milly almost insists on

dressing Susan as the fictional guardian: "and it was no fault of the

girl's if the good lady had n't now appeared in a peaked hat, a short

petticoat and diamond shoe-buckles, brandishing the magic crutch" (I,

145).

179

Merton Densher, like Susan Stringham, is a writer, but he is a

newspaperman rather than a magazine correspondant. He displays his

investigative style by drilling Kate for details of her father's crime.

"You don't, you know, really tell me anything. It's
so vague that what am I to think but that you may very
well be mistaken? What has he done, if no one can name
it?"

"He has done everything."
"Oh — everything! Everything's nothing."
"Well then," said Kate, "he has done some particular
thing." (I, 68)

The account of his early relationship with Kate sets up his eventual

reading of Milly. Kate strikes him, we learn as "just the contemporary

London female, highly modern, inevitably battered, honourably free"

(I, 56). His view of Kate, his profession, and his insistence, after

much traveling in his early years, on "being a Briton," predisposes him

to focus on national differences when he is sent by his newspaper to

America for fifteen or twenty weeks to write a series of letters "from

the strictly social point of view." In America Densher recognizes Milly

as a type of American girl, and other young females become, for him,

other "Little Miss Theales." "They even went so far as to impose

themselves as one of the groups of social phenomena that fell into the

scheme of his public letters" (II, 10). Just as she believes herself

a dove and a fairy princess and acts accordingly, she likewise begins

to refer to herself as the American girl. And, in the same way she

reflects Kate's and Susan's self-perceptions, she also reinforces

Densher1 s, as evidenced by her reaction to seeing him in the gallery:

"indeed 'the English style' of the gentleman--perhaps by instant

contrast to the American--was what had had the arresting power" (I,

292).

180
In similar ways, then, Kate, Susan, and Densher write characteris-
tic fictions to supplement the blank presented by Milly Theale, fictions
that Milly, in turn, reflects. Ruth Yeazell attributes their "telling
themselves stories" to "the human need to make such fictions--to channel
intense feeling by giving it narrative form."44 She continues by
asserting that "the invention of metaphor becomes for them a means to
escape, even to transcend the limits which their world imposes."
Yeazell, however, does not consider that Milly acts as a mirror, casting
the image of the reader/writer back out to him. The metaphors of dove,
princess, and American girl, then, more than demonstrating any "human
need," highlight the blankness, the void, underlying the text.

While these metaphors reveal the blank in which they take place,
Milly's behavior suggests how metaphor behaves within that space. One
of the most frequently commented scenes of the novel presents Milly
"seated at her ease" on a slab of rock "at the end of a short promontory
or excrescence that merely pointed off to the right at gulfs of air"
(I, 123). Such is Milly's precarious "perch," and James is particular
to use that term, employing it just the page before in describing the
houses toward which Milly is walking as "high-perched." "Perch" is a
remarkable word to use here for its myriad implications. First, since
"perch" according to the OED is a slang term for "death," it reaffirms
the traditional reading that in this scene Milly surveys her possi-
bilities in the face of her impending demise. Second, in suggesting an
activity or location associated with birds, the term reasserts the dove
metaphor and all the implications suggested by plume (feather/pen) and
ailes (wings) regarding the writing process. Third, the word suggests

181
another metaphoric connection with the creation of text since "to perch"
means to stretch cloth from a loom, cloth and text being etymological
cognates, upon a perch, that is a bar or pair of parallel bars, for the
purpose of examining and burling, or detecting and removing imperfec-
tions, such as knots and holes. In examining Milly's perch and her role
as dove, then, we perch the text of The Wings of the Dove. A perch is,
moreover, a bar fixed horizontally on which to hang something; as such
it is an agent of suspension, and so a representative and a result of
differance.

Thus, we return, once again, via the dove, to the prefatory medal
metaphor of the text. The medal, we recall is suspended: it hangs
free. "Suspension" is itself an interesting term with pertinent impli-
cations for The Wings of the Dove. Its denotations contradict each
other: suspension can indicate a disruption, as in the suspension of
a service, or it can signal maintenance: the molecular constitution of
a solid, for example, can be maintained, or suspended, in solution.
"Suspension," thus, directly names the temporal and the spatial aspects
of differance and thus becomes an especially appropriate way to
describe the location of meaning in the novel. If meaning can be said
to be found in Milly, she, we must note, is perched, otherwise sus-
pended. If meaning is in the language of the novel, it too, we must
see.,is suspended. As Laurence Holland perceptively observes: "The
language does not so much stipulate its meanings or describe its action

AC.

as suspend them." The most recent editors of the novel, J. Donald
Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, agree: "James's language is designed, not

182
to treat single and separate phenomena, but to hold in suspension a
sweeping multiplicity of references."46

These readers' use of the term "suspend" not only reinforces one
of the definitions of "perch" as an agent of suspension but also
implies in both its temporal and spatial aspects Milly's and so meta-
phor's fate: the abyss, the great deep, perpetual and infinite defer-
ment. James's use of the term "abyss" is widely remarked. Peter Brooks,
in noting the "insistent frequency" of the word in James's writing,
comments: "It may be taken to stand for all the evacuated centers of
( meaning in his fiction that nonetheless animate lives, determine quests
for meaning, and which confer on life, particularly on consciousness,
the urgency and dramatics of melodrama."47 Kenneth Graham, in Henry
James: The Drama of Fulfilment, similarly discovers meaning to be
available in the abyss:

When Milly . . . tells Susie, "I want abysses." it is
clear that "abyss" means "complications" and "relation-
ships" of an implicating kind. Of course the idea of
death is in the word— it at once reminds Susie of Milly's
danoerous Derch on a real precipice, and of her illness—
but "abyss" is primarily Milly's involvement in life, and
not simply a chasm of extinction. 48

In the scheme of the allegory I propose, however, the abyss Milly

contemplates plainly implies the linguistic abyss underlying text and

metaphor: the locus for the dissemination of differance. The scene of

Milly at the abyss can be seen, then, as iconographic, representing

writing, "a movement in itself 'abyssed' as deeps below deeps are

revealed under the force of Derridean deconstruction."4" She is the

written— the metaphor of text, in its definitive pose — on the abyme.

As differance, she actually is abyme, commanding, according to the Yale

183

critics, the entire field of writing. Susan thinks to present Milly

with subtle truth when she tells her "we move in a labyrinth." Milly,

however, cheerfully agrees instead of quietly pondering: "'Of course

we do. That's just the fun of itl' said Milly with a strange gaiety.

Then she added: 'Don't tell me that--in this for instance—there are

not abysses. I want abysses'" (I, 186). She wants abysses because she

yearns for life, for within the space provided by the abyss, she may

continue to disseminate her text of self, live in death, like a ghost,

be an example of text, of presence in absence.

The portrait of Milly at the abyss, like the portrait of the

Bronzino, mirrors her role as metaphor of writing, of textual ity, and

in so mirroring, implies, as mirrors do, death. James's continuing

metaphor of Milly as embodied poetry further suggests the complicity of

death, for metaphor, which inheres in poetry, always has, as Derrida

observes "its own death within it. 1 The argument J. Hillis Miller

constructs in "The Critic as Host" resonates in our reading of The Wings

of the Dove implying "reasons" for the death of Milly Theale. Miller

begins his discussion:

On the one hand, the "obvious or univocal reading" always
contains the "deconstructive reading" as a parasite
encrypted within itself as part of itself. On the other
hand, the "deconstructive" reading can by no means free
itself from the metaphysical reading it means to contest.
The poem in itself, then, is neither the host nor the
parasite but the food they both need, host in another
sense, the third element in this particular triangle.
Both readings are at the same table together, bound by a
strange relation of reciprocal obligation, of gift or food-
giving and gift or food-receiving.

The poem, in my figure, is that ambiguous gift, food,
host in the sense of victim, sacrifice. It is broken,
divided, passed around, consumed by the critics canny
and uncanny who are in that odd relation to one another

184

of host and parasite. Any poem, however, is parasitical
in its turn on earlier poems, or it contains earlier
poems within itself as enclosed parasites, in another
version of the perpetual reversal of parasite and host.
If the poem is food and poison for the critics, it
must in its turn have eaten. It must have been a
cannibal consumer of earlier poems. 52

Milly, the embodiment of poetry, is, obviously, the food on which the

"univocal" and the "deconstructive" readings feed. Literally at turns

guest (at Matcham) and host (at the Palazzo Leporelli), she is also,

however, host, in the sense of victim and sacrifice, to Kate and

Densher's illicit passion; moreover, as we have seen in discussing her

place within the larger fabric of James's work, she is "a cannibal

consumer of other poems," of Christopher Newman and Daisy Miller and

Isabel Archer, for example. Milly, as poem, is thus both victim and

victimizer.

Miller's argument continues:

Deconstruction does not provide an escape from
nihilism, nor from metaphysics, nor from their uncanny
inherence in one another. There is no escape. It does,
however, move back and forth within this inherence. It
makes the inherence oscillate in such a way that one
enters a strange borderland, a frontier region which
seems to give the widest glimpse into the other land
("beyond metaphysics"), though this land may not by any
means be entered and does not in fact exist for Western
man. By this form of interpretation, however, the
border zone itself may be made sensible, as quattrocento
painting makes the Tuscan air visible in its invisibility. 3

Allegorically, Milly encounters that "border zone" that deconstruction

makes tangible in her perch on the precipice overlooking the abyss. In

reaching the edge, she, moreover, commits herself to life in the face of

death. Described as "a survivor" (I, 241), Milly is to live and die on

the edge, the arete, in the blank, that becomes folded into text.

185
For this reason Jacques Derrida's essay on Blanchot's "L'arret de
mort," "Living On: Border Lines," ("Living on" being a translation of
the French survivre) seems to offer a valuable index to The Wings of
the Dove. In this essay Derrida discusses the self-subverting expres-
sion 1 'arret de mort, both a death sentence and a reprieve:

a "text" ... is henceforth no longer a finished corpus
of writing, some content enclosed in a book or its margins,
but a differential network, a fabric of traces referring
endlessly to something other than itself, to other differ-
ential traces. Thus the text overruns all the limits
assigned to it so far (not submerging or drowning them in
an undifferentiated homogeneity, but rather making them
more complex, dividing and multiplying strokes and lines)
--all the limits, everything that was to be set up in
opposition to writing (speech, life, the world, the real,
history, and what not, e\/ery field of reference—to body
or mind, conscious or unconscious, politics, economics,
and so forth). Whatever the (demonstrated) necessity of
such an overrun, such a de-bordement, it still will have
come as a shock, producing endless efforts to dam up,
resist, rebuild the old partitions, to blame what could
no longer be thought without confusion, to blame difference
as_ wrongful confusion! 54

In standing at the edge of the abyss, Hilly overruns all the limits

assigned to her so far, and so increases her own complexity as text by

revealing the abyss. She unabashedly flaunts everything—speech (that

which is imitated by "centered" writing), life (by apparently tempting

death), the world, the real, history, etc. — represented by Susan

Stringham. In appearing at the edge, Milly delimits her text, plunging

"meaning" into the abyss below. Such a reading—a deconstruction— a

debordement, will no doubt come as a shock, producing other, more

standardly acceptable readings, which ignore Milly's differential stance

at the edge. In this scene at the arete, Milly is best presented as

writing since writing can be defined as "something not completely dead:

186
a living dead, a reprieved corpse, a deferred life, a semblance of
breath."55

Not only the text presented by Mil 1 y Theale but also the text of
The Wings of the Dove at large insists on its edges, the empty space
bounding one element and another, the site of metaphor, a defining
feature of economy and differance. Beginning with the Preface, the
text offers words and images that present themselves as edged. For
instance, in his discussion of the medal metaphor, James notes: "If,
as I had fondly noted, the little world determined for her [Milly] was
to 'bristle' — and I delighted in the term! — with meanings, so, by the
same token, could I but make my medal hang free."56 The term "bristle,1
chosen deliberately, implicates edges in its signification since,
according to the OED, the Old Teutonic form of the root syllable is
bors-, pointing to Aryan bhers- from the Sandscrit bhrshti-s, meaning
point, prong, or edge. In the Preface, the bristle-ability of Milly's
world—its edges and their functions— is intimately connected with the
operation of the text as medal, as we have noted, a symbol of economic
differance. The term "bristle" appears repeatedly in the text, as
James's stated delight might imply. And the substitution of the
characterization of Susan Stringham as "full of discriminations" with
"bristled with discriminations" is one of the few substantive changes
between the 1902 and the New York Edition of the novel.

Other edges impinging on Milly are prominent as well. The name
Densher, which resonates in its near homonym "indenture," for example,
suggests marginal space. For indenture means to indent, or to snip,
notch, or jag on the edges. Edges further characterize Densher' s

187
concerns. For instance, when he enters Lancaster Gate for the first
time, his attention is focused at the edges: "He had never dreamed of
anything so fringed and scalloped, so buttoned and corded, drawn
everywhere so tight and curled everywhere so thick" (I, 78-79). Each
of the three major settings in the novel — England, the Alps, and
Venice—feature edges, each of which opens onto an abyss. An island,
England is surrounded by water; the mountain precipices tower over the
jagged edges of chasms; and in Venice, even the palaces are built at
the water's edge. Images of floating and of water pervade the novel:
Kate and Densher are said to be "floating" at least twice, Milly is at
turns borne up by a flood, lost in a sea of science, and caught in a
current, and Densher and Susie are "at sea." These various watery
abysses become visible only from assorted "edges." Kate and Densher
walk the edge of social acceptability, Susie of involvement and non-
involvement, and Milly, of course, of life and death.

In this way the edge comes to serve as a metonymy of the abyss.
For Densher, the fringed, scalloped, buttoned, and corded edges imply
a nihilism suggested by the image of the abyss:

These things finally represented for nim a portentous
negation of his own world of thought—of which, for that
matter, in the presence of them, he became as for the
first time, hopelessly aware. They revealed it to him by
their merciless difference. (I, 79)

Likewise, the many references to water and sea, references etymologi-

cally apparent in the word "abyss," suggest edges and metaphors and

metonymies of edges. We can point, for example, to an early account of

the relationship between Milly and Susie:

188

The sense was constant for her that their relation
might have been afloat, like some island of the south,
in a great warm sea that represented, for every con-
ceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general
emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything
in particular was to make the sea submerge the island,
the margin flood the text. (I, 199)

In this way, through the poetic play of metaphor and metonymy, the
bounding main (the sea, implied by the edge) dissolves to the binding
mind: the tendency, especially in late James, for the book to become a
metaphor for the individual and for the landscape of the consciousness.
The sea, the abyss, the margin, overwhelms and overtakes the edge of the
island/text, swallowing it. Laurence Holland works with the metaphoric
book in The Wings of the Dove but sticks closely to a discussion of
the social atlas as "conceived both as an integral whole and as a series
of discrete pages.' Although his points are well taken, he unduly
limits his discussion to the specific references to the differences
between English and American registries. He does not note that the
metaphor of the book both frames and composes The Wings of the Dove.

The metaphor is surely implied often enough: Susie and Densher
are both writers, Milly and Kate are both suggested to be "books" in
more ways than one. Milly' s success in Italy is said to resemble
the success of "the last great native novel" (II, 136), and Densher,
finding himself back in England after completing his stateside assign-
ment is "once more but a sentence, of a sort, in the general text, the
text that, from his momentary street-corner [he, too, we note, is on
the edge], showed as a great grey page of print that somehow managed to
be crowded without being 'fine'" (II, 11).

189
Even more than the printed text, however, the margin, the blank at
the edge of the page, becomes a metonymy of text, just as wings, the
ailes, become the defining feature of the dove, and their folding names
her death. The margin is the place at which folding occurs in book-
making. Thus, the many significant references to uncut books — Milly
carries the Tauchnitz and Kate's uncut pages are mentioned twice--
insist upon their margins for purposes of definition: they, Milly and
Kate, can have their secrets, Milly her disease, and Kate her father's
crimes, because their margins are uncut. I count at least eleven
different appearances of the term "margin," a rather specialized word
whose frequency cannot help but be marked, especially since, by defini-
tion, a margin is the space immediately adjacent to a well, a river, a
piece of water; an edge, border, or brink. Milly, for example, has
long been conscious "of her unused margin as an American girl — closely
indeed as in the English air the text might appear to cover the page"
(I, 295). Densher calls his and Kate's secret a margin: "The margin
had been his name for it—for the thing that, though it had held out,
could bear no shock" (II, 261).

A margin marks the edge. In fact, one definition of "mark" is
margin. So, "mark," a sign, a written symbol, curiously comes to
replace or supplement a margin, an emptiness, a blank located at the
edge. Thus, the margin becomes the scene of writing. In The Wings of
the Dove, the Piazza San Marco--Saint Mark's Square, the "center" of
Venetian commerce, art, and cul ture--imitates a margin. As the text
notes, it is a "vast empty space." Moreover, if we recall that Saint
Mark is the patron saint of Venice, we can more easily recognize the

190
appropriateness of" that city for suggesting metaphors of text. "To
write," notes Derrida in Marges de la philosophie, "is to produce a
mark which constitutes in its turn a kind of productive mechanism,
which my absence will not, as a matter of principle, prevent from
functioning and provoking reading, from yielding itself up to reading
and rewriting."58

The Wings of the Dove marks out other gaps and spaces within its
own margins, further abyssing meaning. For example, Milly conceals
meaning by folding language back upon itself in a sort of double-speak
reply to Mrs. Stringham's query "Are you in trouble--in pain?" Their
following repartee not only visually imitates a fan-like folding
motion by moving quickly back and forth between the participants, but
also suggests the absence of definitive meaning underlying language.
Milly replies to Susan's question:

"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder—!"

"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"

"Well, if I shall have much of it."

Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"

"Of everything. Of everything I have."

Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about.
"You 'have' everything; so that when you say 'much' of
it-"

"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for
long? That is if I have got it."

"If you've got an ailment?"
"If I've got everything," Milly laughed.
"Ah that—like almost nobody else."
"Then for how long?" (I, 130-131)

The folded, fan-like conversation imitative of text provides a

structural homology for the entire novel, which defers meaning in folds,

on edges, in margins. The structure of The Wings of the Dove is

191
architectural, as many before me, including James in his prefatory
comments, have observed. The novel I read, however, is one composed
of structured spaces rather than of solid blocks. Thus, I find the
gaps between rectangle and square in "The Doctor's Door" and the dark
spaces of the arcades in "The Venetian Palace" more indicative of the
composition of the text than the facades themselves. The structuring
gaps of the novel occur at approximately seventeen textual edges marked
by an expression containing a form of the copula, to be, a form under-
stood though often omitted in dialects, pidgins, and Creoles, a sort of
"empty set." Derrida, too, asserts that "is" "is not" in "The Cross-
roads of the 'Est,'" a section of his "Dissemination" essay. "Read in
the gap, it never comes to be." The copula, he suggests, is the site
of dissemination, and so metaphor and writing. So, too, in The Wings of
the Dove, where the seventeen edges marked by the copula signal the
abyss.62

On the first appearance of the expression only a few pages into
the novel, Kate and her father use the copula to discuss their abysmal
relationship. Lionel Croy explains: "It's just why I've sent for you —
that you may see me as I really am." Kate replies: "Oh, papa, it's
long since I've ceased to see you otherwise than as you really are'."
(I, 9). A similar scene occurs on the final page, neatly folding the
wings of the novel. After Densher promises that he will still marry
Kate, a short conversation follows, which, by insisting on the changes
that have taken place in their relationship, ultimately defers that
relationship forever.

192

"I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were. "

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was
now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!" (II, 405)

Between these two occasions are many others, all of which create edges

implicating the differential action of the abyss. For example, after

Milly tells Kate of her illness, she says, "So there we are," and the

text continues, "There they were then" (I, 229). At one crisis in their

affair, Densher asks Kate, "Will you take me just as I am?" (II, 19).

As things grow more and more complicated at the Venetian palace, Milly

asks Eugenio to get her an hour alone so that, she says, "I may just a

little, all by myself, see where I am" (II, 141). In every instance the

copula undercuts its own function, to connect. Instead, it interrupts

and suggests discontinuity.

The text's recourse to the copula as enigmatic, causing some
discussion about our reading of the end of the novel. The phrases
suggest, however, more than any meaning, its differential, changing
nature since "as we were" is not "as we are." Our reading is disengaged
at each of these instances of "there we are," and we respond to the text
with the question "where?". We are, of course, along with Milly, on the
edge of the abyss.

The abysses, watery and otherwise, only begin to suggest reasons
why we cannot fix meaning in The Wings of the Dove. The abyss is the
site of metaphor and of differance. Nonetheless, critics desperately
try to establish a secure foothold in the novel by casting Milly as
Minnie Temple or as Christ and Densher and Kate as pityable villains.
Efforts to "cling to the Rockies" prove fruitless, for the reader

193
repeatedly finds himself trapped in gaps or gazing into textual chasms,
first and most importantly in the personal metaphor of Milly Theale.
She is, as the text insists, "a figure to be waited for, named and
fitted" (I, 212). A figure--a trope--she is text-metaphor-poetry-dif-
ferance. The dove with the folded wings inhabits the center of the text
thus producing a replica of the abyss she supplements.

Kenneth Graham thinks that in recent readings "the act of writing
becomes the protagonist of the fiction it creates; mirror is held up to
mirror." He complains: "This is unfair to James, for it makes him out
to be almost as dazzling--and as mandarin — as his critics. "^3 To my
mind, however, such readings reach deep into the text and texture of
The Wings of the Dove, suggesting our reasons for the perennial diffi-
culty in pinning down the text. Such readings further suggest why,
although we do not get "close" to Milly Theale, she is nevertheless a
compelling figure. Her story is affecting because she represents our
own textual concerns. James claims himself a poet in the Preface to
The Wings of the Dove, and Milly is one of his best poems. In being a
dove, she provides a paradigm of the differential activity of metaphor
and of language as a whole within a specific though allegorically general
textual construct.

194

Notes

William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, in The Complete Signet Classic
Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1972).

2
Anonymous, "Mr. Henry James's New Book," in Henry James, The Wings

of the Dove, ed. J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (New York:

Norton, 1978), p. 481.

3
Oscar Cargill, The Novels of Henry James (New York: Macmillan,

1961), p. 374.

4
John Carlos Rowe, Henry Adams and Henry James: The Emergency of

a Modern Consciousness (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 172-

173.

5
Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of

the Human Sciences," in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass.

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 280.

Henry James, The Wings of the Dove (New York: Scribner's, 1909),
I, 6. Hereafter volume and page number will be noted parenthetically
within the text.

Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Interpretation:
Theory and Practice, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins Press, 1969), p. 191.

8de Man, p. 192.

g
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and

Wang, 1974), p. 42.

Henry James, The Art of the Novel CNew York: Scribner's, 1934),
p. 302.

James, The Art of the Novel

306.

296.

297.

300.

James, The Art of the Novel

James, The Art of the Novel , p. 300.

Although this definition comes from Webster's Collegiate Diction-
ary, all others were found in the OED.

James, The Art of the Novel , p. 294.

195
1 R

Jonathan Culler, "Commentary," New Literary History, 6, No. 1
(1974), 212.

19
Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology," trans. F. C. T. Moore, New

Literary History, 6, No. 1 (1974), 13.
20Derrida, "White Mythology," 7.

21Derrida, "White Mythology," 14.

22
J. L. Dillard, All-American English (New York: Vintage Books,

1976), p. 50.

23
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Introd., Of Grammatology, by Jacques

Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974),

p. xlii.

24
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of

Chicago Press, 1972), p. 8.

25
Derrida, Positions, p. 8.

26Rowe, p. 171.

27Rowe, p. 172.

28Rowe, p. 174.

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 276.

•^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 277.

Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of

Reality," in On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago and London:

Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 1-23.

32Cargill, pp. 330-347.

33See, for example, Lotus Snow, "The Poetry of Mary Temple," The
New England Quarterly, 31, No. 3 (1958), 312-339.

■^See, for example, Ernest Sandeen, "The Wings of the Dove and The
Portrait of a Lady: A Study of Henry James's Later Phase," PMLA, 69,
No. 5 (1954), 1060-1075.

Elsa Nettles, James and Conrad (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press,
1977), suggests as much in her argument.

196

Charles Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James (Durham,
N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1977), p. 182.

37Anderson, p. 212.

■3D

For the logic suggesting that supplements imply absence, see
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 145.

^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 137.

40Anderson, p. 187.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 277.

^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 142.

43Rowe, p. 171.

44Ruth Bernard Yeazell , Language and Knowledge in the Late Fiction
of Henry James (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 63.

Laurence B. Holland, The Expense of Vision (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1964), p. 288.

J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks, "Notes on the Text," in
The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James (New York: Norton, 1978), p. 413.

Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James,
Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976),
pp. 173-174.

Kenneth Graham, Henry James: The Drama of Fulfilment (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 183, n. 12.

4'Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1980), p. 173.

50
Lentricchia, p. 173.

51Derrida, "White Mythology," 74.

52
J. Hill is Miller, "The Critic as Host," in Deconstruction and

Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 224-

225.

53
Miller, p. 231. Note, too, the coincidental appropriateness of

the image of a quattrocento painting, that period being among James's

favorites.

197

54
Jacques Derrida, "Living On: Border Lines," trans. James Hulbert,

in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Seabury

Press, 1979), p. 84.

^Derrida, Dissemination, p. 143.

56James, The Art of the Novel , p. 294.

57Holland, p. 300.

Jacques Derrida, Marges de la philosophie, cited in Jonathan
Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1975),

p. 132.

J For an elaboration of the fan metaphor and its implications for

textual ity, see Derrida, Dissemination, p. 251.

^°See, for example, Graham, p. 179.

Derrida, Dissemination, p. 353.

°~A1 though I have probably overlooked several instances of James's
use of the copula, it appears on the following pages: I, 9 (Kate tells
her father that she sees him as he is ); I, 59 (the lovers' desire to
keep their meetings "as they were"); I, 97 (the lovers talk of "Our
being as we are."); I, 229 (Mil 1 y confesses her illness and in finishing
says "So there we are."); I, 269 (Mi 1 ly misreads Aunt Maud's hints at
Kate and Densher's relationship and says "Ah there we are!"); II, 19
(Densher asks Kate if she will take him "just as I am."); II, 32 (Maud
wants Densher to be, as she says, "exactly as J_ am."); II, 78 (Hi 1 1 y
tells Densher she will not he ill for him, she concludes, "So there you
are."); II, 92 (Kate tells Densher that she has told Mil ly nothing, con-
cluding "So there you are."j; II, 123 (Upon getting Susie to admit that
Sir Luke works for her, Milly says "Ah there you are!"); II, 128 (Sir
Luke tells Milly to go on "ar you are. " ) ; II, 141 (Milly begs for an
hour to "see where I am."); II, 208 (Stuck in Venice, Densher tries to
write, but cannot: "So there he was."); II, 209 (Susan and Densher
discuss sacrifice and she concludes, "there you are!"); II, 348
(Densher tells Kate: "here I am. It's a_s I am that you must have me.")
II, 379 (Kate confesses that Lord Mark has spoken out. Densher replies,
"Ah there you are!"); II, 405 (Densher asks to marry Kate "As we were.").

Graham, p. xiii.

CHAPTER SIX
THE END IS NOT YET

DESPEMONA: 0 most lame and impotent conclusion.

William Shakespeare, Othello, II.i.1591

In Dissemination, Jacques Derrida notes: "A text is not a text
unless it hides from the first comer, from the first glance, the law of
its composition and the rules of its game. A text remains, moreover,
forever imperceptible.1 Although we can be sure of little else, we
may be certain that the narratives of Henry James--both Prefaces and
novels — qualify as texts according to Derrida1 s definition. Not only
do they hide from the first comers (and from the second, third, and
fourth comers); in deferring meaning, the texts hide from all comers.
That we have sensed since experiencing our first frustrations with
James's fine pointing of picture and scene and with his disjunctive
syntax.

Until recently, however, we have lacked the methodology with which
to explain both our difficulties and our distinct fascination with these
elusive texts. Two of the most popular approaches to James, thematic
and psychological, treat the narrative as "work" and so, often limit
themselves to discussions of content and form. These readings neglect
treating the narrative as ecriture and so ignore the subversive under-
side of language. With the development of structuralism and post-
structuralism, we now have the concepts to explain why, in the on-going

198

199
interpretive game of hide-and-seek, we are always "It." Despite our
calls of "ally, ally in free," the Jamesian text continues to hide, its
presence continually deferred.

The questions I have sought to canvas in this study are, first,
why these texts hide, and, second, how they hide: the devices they use,
the textual manifestations of their absence for the reader, the partic-
ular manner in which each text absents itself. One of the primary
purposes of Chapter One was to explain how a recent shift in certain
philosophical thinking has led to our reconceiving our notions of mean-
ing. The shift has been from a tradition of "presence," in which
belief in the cogito led to a belief in the original unity of the sign,
to a philosophy which, tutored by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, called
into question the presence of consciousness to itself. Similarly, the
new philosophy indicted other "presences," such as the concept of origin
and the transparency of writing. Under the Western metaphysical tradi-
tion, the written word was thought to be a faithful record, a natural
reflection of the privileged spoken word, and meaning was understood to
be transmitted unaltered by language.

With the advent of Saussurian linguistics, however, the arbitrary
relationship between a word and its meaning was recognized and stressed,
and the sign was split into the binary opposites of signifier and signi-
fied. This opposition, along with others (langue and parole and syn-
chronic and diachronic modes of investigation) became counters in
structuralist methodologies. Certain post-Saussurian philosophers,
however, particularly Jacques Derrida, while agreeing with Saussure's
notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, disputed the structure of

200

binary oppositions erected by Saussurian linguistics. They replaced

the binary oppositions with the concept of differance. Gayatri Spivak

notes that "Differance invites us to undo the need for balanced

equations, to see if each term in an opposition is not after all an

accomplice of the other. "3 Oppositions arrest play by restricting the

meaning of a term to a reflection of its binary opposite and by confining

the sign to presence. Derrida remarks:

At the point at which the concept of differance, and the
chain attached to it, intervenes, all the conceptual
oppositions of metaphysics (signifier/signified; sensible/
intelligible; writing/speech; passivity/activity, etc.) —
to the extent that they ultimately refer to the presence of
something present . . . become nonpertinent.4

As a result of differance, then, language does not and cannot fix mean-
ing. A dynamic system, language constantly defers meaning, often sub-
verting itself in the linguistic sediment.

If we accept the notion of the differential play of language, a
concept inherent in, as J. Hill is Miller calls it, a tradition of
absence, we can no longer believe that novels, for example, are original
works created by privileged father/authors with legal rights to them.
Rather, texts become understood as bri col ages or as mosaics of other
texts, thus nullifying the romantic imperative of originality. Each
novel becomes a rereading and a rewriting of ones that preceded it: an
intertextual event. The author does not produce the text; rather, the
text produces what we know as the writer. Given a system in which we
can no longer take language at face value, we cannot believe that
literature, the essential manifestation of language, according to
Tzvetan Todorov, is transparent, and that meaning is available on the

201
textual surface. On the contrary, meaning, by virtue of the language
in which it must be written, is deferred in the sedimented layers of
language.

Thus, the text eludes efforts to fix its meaning because signifi-
cance is delayed in linguistic play. James seems to recognize that, as
I tried to show in my second chapter examining his poetics. I do not
suggest that James is a nineteenth-century Derrida or a harbinger of
post-structuralism; however, I do insist that Jamesian critical theory
can preface what we find in much of Barthes and Derrida. James, for
example, in discussing the "seeds" of his work, terms spilled unwitt-
ingly by neighbors at dinner parties, suggests their disseminating
possibilities. Seeds, he seems to recognize, can be either planted or
scattered to the wind. A la Barthes, James refers in several critical
texts to the fabric-like character of narrative: the writer, like the
weaver, ceases at an arbitrary point since the fabric could continue
indefinitely. Moreover, the fabric, however finely woven, contains
holes which lure the reader into a labyrinth. Indeed, if a joke be
permitted, James's texts, like those interrogated by Barthes, tend to
come apart at their semes. James and recent theorists share many ideas
concerning the activities of the text, the writer, and the reader. By
treating James and Derrida--the Master and le Maitre — intertextually,
as participants in a conversation, both may speak louder and more
clearly.

My discussions of the three novels, The American, The Spoils of
Poynton, and The Wings of the Dove, attempted to demonstrate how each

202
text refers over and over again to its own textual ity. Each of the
texts offers a library of narrative intertexts from a variety of
dramatic, operatic, artistic, poetic, and novelistic contexts. One of
James's earlier efforts, The American, insistently provides these inter-
texts as supplements which assist in weaving the narrative fabric.
Countless references to all sorts of other embedded fictions further
mark the fictional nature of the novel.

The American provides other devices by which the text announces its
absence and its "supplementary" character, such as the symbols of the
fan and the statuette of the monk, but its characteristic defining
property is intertextuality. James's later productions demonstrate
their textual ity using more subtle measures. Although they still in-
clude Dickensian and Thackerayan intertexts, as in The Wings of the
Dove, and refer to the protagonist as "our heroine," these later works,
instead of naming the symbol of the fan, imitate the action of a fan,
a metaphor of textuality. A fan folds back upon itself, deferring
"meaning" into its folds, like a text, whose significance we must chase
into the labyrinth. For example, in The Spoils of Poynton, Mrs. Gereth
stands waiting on the first page and Fleda waits on the last. Within
the text are several other scenes of waiting: Mrs. Gereth's waiting
for Owen and Mona's wedding announcement to appear in the papers,
Fleda' s anticipation of Owen's breaking the engagement, Mona's refusal
to marry until the "things" are restored to Poynton Park. In such a
way the repeated scenes of waiting, of deferral and delay of meaning--
that is, of the perfection of Poynton for Mrs. Gereth and of love for
Fleda--imitate the action of a fan. Thus, the story of The Spoils of

203
Poynton becomes a narrative of the activity of narrative. Similarly,
in The Wings of the Dove the text folds back upon itself in the
repeated play of the copula. The play on statements by all concerned
such as "There we are" and "As we were," statements in which the copula
is not completed by a complement, suggests delay within the textual
folds.

Not only is the method of self- referential ity refined in the later
novels, but the role art plays is made more important and rendered more
subtly. While in The American the paintings Newman sees at the Louvre
serve simply as narrative intertexts which both name the textual compo-
sition of the novel and foreshadow events to come, in the later works,
art itself is seen as subversive. For instance, in The Spoils of
Poynton, Poynton is a metaphor of art. Not only is it empty during
most of the novel, but its absence is made literal at the end by
Poynton1 s destruction. In The Wings, Milly is art incarnate: the
Bronzino, embodied poetry. She, like Poynton dies, her textual ity, her
supplemented presence, realized in her death. Instead of being left
with the presence of art, we are presented, as James was upon revising
that novel for the New York Edition, with "the absent values, the
palpable voids."

Ultimate, fixed meaning is deferred into the folds of each of the
three texts by different means. In the early work The American, meaning
is deferred in the play between languages, actually lost in translation.
Newman is neither reader, nor writer, nor linguist, and once we question
his knowledge of the way languages function and his naive belief in the
integrity of the sign, we understand why the Bellegardes are not

204
threatened by his possession of the incriminating note allegedly penned
by a dying M. de Bellegarde. In The Spoils of Poynton, meaning, in the
form of the completeness of art for Mrs. Gereth and of the fulfillment
of love for Fleda Vetch, is deferred in at least two ways. First,
Poynton, that symbol of artistic perfection and completeness, undoes
itself in the subversive play of the name "Poynton." Second, Fleda,
from whose point of view the novel is narrated, acts as a hymeneal text
throughout. Structurally a representative of potential penetration
(and literally a virgin experiencing sexual love), she stands between
masculine and feminine forces: between Poynton and Waterbath, between
Poynton and Ricks, between Owen and Mona, and between Owen and his
mother. Fleda also acts as the mythic Hymen by eventually eliminating
the last obstacle to Owen and Mona's marriage by convincing Mrs. Gereth
to return the treasures to the family seat. A hymen is a folded
structure, like a fan, and, as Derrida suggests, meaning is deferred
within its folds. Likewise, meaning is delayed within Fleda, as her
name suggests and as our last glimpse of her, waiting on a train plat-
form, verifies. Finally, in The Wings of the Dove, of course, meaning
cannot escape the folds and margins of the abysmal text of Milly Theale.
The abyss, in fact, is always the fate of meaning in James, because
language cannot stay its own deferment. Little wonder that the word
appears in so many contexts throughout the Jamesian oeuvre, as Strother
B. Purdy has carefully detailed.

Within the abyss the notion of origin is meaningless. Appropri-
ately, then, representatives of origins are scarce in James.

205
Christopher Newman, who avowedly prefers copies, has forsaken his land
of origin to pursue culture, and more important, a wife, in Europe.
Fleda Vetch's father wishes to sever his relations with her while Kate
Croy wishes to disentangle her life from her father's. Madame de
Cintre's dead father presents a complication for Newman as Owen's dead
father does for Mrs. Gereth and Fleda, and Milly's dead father does for
Densher and Kate: it is Milly's inherited wealth which has precipitated
the lovers' plot.

Origins are repudiated or absented in some way in James, exempli-
fying his kinship with other American writers. John T. Irwin has
recently shown in American Hieroglyphics that questions of origin and
writing link the major writers of the American Renaissance. He also
poses the question of the subversive equation of death and the abyss,
a question which is particularly pertinent for The Wings of the Dove.
Irwin ponders: "The abyss is, after all, the endless, the limitless--
it is infinity; while death is the absolute limit of human conscious-
ness."' James's texts, however, are not of the American Renaissance.
Rather, in their historical situation between the classic writings of
the Transcendentalists, Dickinson and Whitman, and Hawthorne, Poe, and
Melville, and the modern works of twentieth-century writers, they form
another sedimented layer in the American literary text. Even as an
oeuvre, then, James's texts form an edge, a margin, further insisting
on their differential character.

In a recent review praising the boldness of Irwin's rereading of
the American Renaissance, Gary Lee Stonum voices a concern I share:

206

Most scholars of American literature have shown an
intense hostility to what they still regularly call
structuralism. On the other hand, the shock of re-
cognition among other students of American litera-
ture has been equally intense. It has seemed to
some of us that the roomy folds of post-structuralist
thinking especially hold a great and somewhat
unexpected promise. What in its native European
context avows itself to be the subversive underside
of dominant cultural traditions appears strangely
central to the American canon. The hope has thus
been that these ideas and approaches might supply an
interpretive jimmy, one capable of opening the R
otherwise recalcitrant features of our classic texts.

Perhaps the hostility of American scholars toward post-structuralism was
caused by the esoteric, aesthetic, philosophical — in other words,
Continental --bent of the trend. Americans have long distrusted imports,
especially, it seems, those from France. The American critical empha-
sis, thanks in part to Williams James's pragmatism, has always been on
application rather than on abstract theory. Hence the critical and
pedagogical success of Brooks and Warren's version of the New Criticism.
Post-structuralism, however, has recently begun to come into its own in
America since its domestication and application by critics such as
J. Hillis Miller. It will, I think, continue to gain support as more
readers, in becoming more comfortable with it, apply it to develop new
readings, as Miller does to Shelley and Stevens. As Paul B. Armstrong
remarked in a review of two recent books on James: "a new generation
of James criticism has begun. ... We must wait and see how much James

and the field of literary study benefit from the battle."

In numbering myself among the avant-garde in the battle, I use
typical (and traditional) Jamesian battle imagery to assert a radical
critical stance. Throughout this study, in fact, I have employed a

207
similar eclectic approach, at turns mixing structuralist and post-
structuralist theories and using them in combination with more tradi-
tional thematic and formal istic approaches. My ratio of one brand of
criticism to another varies with the text: for example, my reading of
The American leans toward structuralism, my discussion of The Spoils of
Poynton approaches a playful Miller-esque deconstruction, and the
chapter on The Wings of the Dove melds more traditional allegorical
criticism with Derridean theory. What then, as I see it, is the rela-
tionship between James and post-structuralism, particularly Derrida?
As part of the same intertextual network, they often provide useful and
engrossing but always provocative commentary on each other, as even the
stodgiest of American literature scholars will, I hope, agree.

My applications of recent critical theory and of James's own
theory as read through contemporary intertexts to The American, The
Spoils of Poynton, and The Wings of the Dove attempt to discover the
ways in which the texts, in subverting themselves — their unity, their
"reality"--treat their own textual ity, and in so doing, indefinitely
delay what we have come to understand as "meaning." In the tradition
of American literary criticism, I have used theory to further our
comprehension and thus, as I see it, our enjoyment of the individual
texts. James and the field of literary study cannot fail to benefit
from the efforts of such criticism. To paraphrase James's own assess-
ment of what he called "the new novel" of "the younger generation":
"The new, or at least the young, criticism is up and doing with the
best faith, clearly, and the highest spirits in the world." Likewise,

208
with the best faith and the highest spirits, I submit this study, in
hopes that I have demonstrated some of the potential of the new
generation of James critics.

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite
problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his
own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so." In
this quotation from the post-written Preface to his first acknowledged
novel, Roderick Hudson, James broaches the problem of closure. Endings,
he concedes, are really artificial constructs and closure is arbitrary.
The word denouement, we recall, means the unknotting of the complica-
tions, but it is also often viewed as the tying up of loose ends. The
activity of unknotting produces diverse strands of sense, not organic
wholes. Moreover, the very nature of ecriture, to defer meaning along
a disseminating chain, denies and forbids closure, the assumed purpose
of a conclusion. As we saw in Chapter Two, the prefatory endeavor is
impossible due to the absence of origins unless we redefine the preface
as a simulacrum of the post-face. Similarly, the project of conclusion-
writing is subversive: conclusions, given the differential nature of
language, cannot conclude. At best, they can provide only simulacrums
of prefaces to be written. Thus, the problematics of the preface and
of the conclusion are opposite sides of a coin, reflections in a mirror,
identities with differences, separated only by a hymen of ecriture.

James's closing sentence of his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady

seems an appropriate prefatory conclusion: "There is really too much

..12

to say.

209

Notes

William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Complete Signet Classic
Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1972).

Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 63.

3
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Introd., Of Grammatology, by Jacques

Derrida (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974),

p. lix.

4
Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of

Chicago Press, 1981), p. 29.

5
Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard

(Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1977), p. 119.

Strother B. Purdy, "Henry James' Abysses: A Semantic Note,"
English Studies, 51, No. 5 (1970), 424-433.

John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics (New Haven and London:
Yale Univ. Press, 1980), p. 187.

Gary Lee Stonum, "Undoing American Literary History," rev. of
American Hieroglyphics, by John Irwin, Diacritics, 11, No. 3 (1981),
p. 3.

g
Paul B. Armstrong, "James: The Critical Phases," Novel , 14,

No. 1 (1980), 94.

Henry James, "The Younger Generation," in Henry James and H. G.
Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of
Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (1958;
rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 179. James's exact
words are: "The new, or at least the young, novel is up and doing
with the best faith, clearly, and the highest spirits in the world."

Henry James, The Art of the Novel , ed. Richard P. Blackmur
(New York: Scribner's, 1934), p. 5.

James, The Art of the Novel , p. 58.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Cheryl B. Torsney was born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1955. She
received her education in the Youngstown public schools and at Villa
Maria High School, Villa Maria, Pennsylvania. Upon graduating cum
laude from Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, in 1977, with a
B.A. in American literature and French language, she and her husband,
Jack Torsney, moved to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where she earned an
M.A. in English from Louisiana State University in 1979. After
receiving the Ph.D. in English from the University of Florida,
Gainesville, Florida, Ms. Torsney will spend a year as a Fulbright
lecturer in American literature at the Centre Universitaire de Savoie,
Chambery, France. She will be an Assistant Professor of English at
Delta State University, Cleveland, Mississippi, following her return
from abroad.

222

I certify that I have read this study and that in my opinion it
conforms to acceptable standards of scholarly presentation and is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a dissertation for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.

Alistair M. Duckworth, Chairman
Professor of English

John M. Perlette

Associate Professor of English

Ira Clark

Associate Professor of English

'■4etJ-r jQ&ui^u.)

Richard £. Brantley /— ry
Associate Professor of Engjish

Raymond Gay-Crosier
Professor of Romance Languages

This dissertation was submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the
Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and
to the Graduate Council, and was accepted as partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

August 1982

Dean for Graduate Studies and
Research

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

3 1262 07332 054 0

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